Four Years in Startups

• I hovered on the periphery, hoping that the engineers would adopt me. Some of them had unnaturally colored hair and punk-rock piercings, signalling industry seniority as much as subcultural affiliation. I had no idea what it would be like to be a woman in tech whose skill set was respected. I was disappointed that it wasn’t dissimilar from being a women in tech whose skill set wasn’t.
• For years, my co-workers told me, the absence of an official organizational chart had given rise to a shadow chart, determined by social relationships and proximity to the founders. As the male engineers wrote manifestos about the importance of collaboration, women struggled to get their contributions reviewed and accepted. The company promoted equality and openness until it came to stock grants: equity packages described as “nonnegotiable” turned out to be negotiable for people who were used to successfully negotiating. The name-your-own-salary policy had resulted in a pay gap so severe that a number of women had recently received corrective increases of close to forty thousand dollars. No back pay.
• I was employee No. 230-something. I had no trouble identifying the early employees. I saw my former self in their monopolization of the chat rooms, their disdain for the growing sales team, their wistfulness for the way things had been.. Sometimes I would yearn for their sense of ownership and belonging–the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation.
• Later, I mentioned to a co-worker that all Internet harassment now seemed to follow the same playbook: the methods of the far-right commenters were remarkably similar to that of the troll bloc that, eighteen months earlier, had targeted women in gaming. It was bizarre to me that the two groups would have the same rhetorical and tactical strategies. My co-worker, a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards, looked at me askance. “Oh, my sweet summer child,” he said. “Those groups are not different. They are absolutely the same people.”
• San Francisco was tipping into a full-blown housing crisis. […] There was a lot of discussion, particularly among the entrepreneurial class, about city-building. Everyone was reading “The Power Broker”–or, at least, reading summaries of it. Armchair urbanists blogged about Jane Jacobs and discovered Haussmann and Le Corbusier.
• There was a running joke that the tech industry was simply reinventing commodities and services that had long existed. Cities everywhere were absorbing these first-principles experiments.