PSA: Yelp does not care about you. Also, a challenge to Silicon Valley
Another day, another horrifying story of labor treatment at Yelp — hot on the backs of talia jane’s scathing indictment of her experience at the $1.5 billion company. Cue the attendant chorus of empathetic humans accompanied by a mass of elitist neoliberal vitriol about the virtues of Personal Responsibility, finger-waggling moralizing over which shelf The Poors should be choosing their liquor from with which to drown their sorrows, and the definitionally eminent foolishness of anyone who hasn’t already “made it” in the Valley (like the author has, natch — and boy how hard they worked to get it!! chain gangs got nuthin’ on these guys (though none are quite so forthcoming about their Starting Conditions)).
Much of the criticism centers on the idea that somehow, you should just have known beforehand that conditions are insanely unmanageable in the Valley, and that you’ll have to either be financially supported by someone(s) else and/or be willing to make serious sacrifices to the otherwise typical project of Pursuing Adulthood in your early post-collegiate years; in my parents’ generation, the typical script was to get married, save for a few years to buy a house, then set about the “still roaring from the New Deal economy” project of starting a family. Of course those days are long gone, and not just in the Valley — but somehow history is never a popular discussion in an industry so blindingly focused on the Glorious Future that it becomes taboo to mention the economic and political framework it sits within.
The secret of the Silicon Valley Fight Club
But then — how exactly would one access this apparently obvious knowledge, a priori? If one is not already an industry insider, how would one be privy to the backstage reality vs. its marvelous front of house productions dazzling the rabble of America (which, in the tech industry, refers to “anyone not in the tech industry”) about the tantalizing promise of infinite economic opportunity? Why would the presumption be anything other than Batshit Amazeballs, when no one talks about what it’s really like when you’re not (…yet) a Fortunate Son? And when they do have the guts to speak up about their emotionally twisting and ethically questionable experiences, the Shockingly Unobsequious are shouted down in no uncertain terms and explicitly instructed to keep the Bay area’s secrets secret. And also fired.
Both recent whistleblower cases have been women — which does nothing to help the overwhelming perception that Silicon Valley has a glaring diversity problem. It does — and that problem is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that can’t be waved away as some sort of minor oversight that can be addressed by increasing the number of internal HR hiring practice seminars that no one pays attention to. It is a systemic problem embedded into the very framework (see Kat Ely’s excellent post on how “The world is designed for men” for a rundown on how fundamental psychological bias permeates almost everything in unseen ways) of an industry that, as previously mentioned, avoids doing any potentially “frame-breaking” introspection — or really much self-examination at all.
It is an industry that seems perennially unable to escape the self-interest bias that drives it economically, with consequence that talking to anyone in the Valley will only ever paint a picture of the Upside while sweeping the Downside under the nearest $87,000 rug. Just imagine how tall the shelf must be that held the whiskey John Thain was drinking to drown his sorrows as his firm, and the entire global economy around it, was crumbling into a dust of his own making — with “leaders” like this as our examples, is it any wonder some of us are getting mixed messages about how exactly to Be Successful in the brave new economy?
Upside for everyone!* (*…who’s deserving)
Granted it’s a Wall Street analogy above, but the comparison holds true in the sense that, in the market correction hitting the Valley right now, only some will feel the pain in an acute way that threatens their livelihood. It’s doubtful the “pain of lost investment” will be treated with fiscal restraint measures the way we advise entry- and mid-level workers to Tighten Up and Buckle Down, or Take on New Roommates, or Get a Second Job (now that you’ve been laid off from the first, you’ve only got 2 new ones to find!), or “golly gee, have you heard about how Airbnb is totally helping the middle class stay afloat”?! Now you can make some extra cash by pricing yourself out of your own apartment — it’s like getting all the benefits of being a landlord without all those pesky obligations and taxes!
The investor and founder sets will dust themselves off, take an Uber to their next networking appointment, and potentially have a blurry term sheet on a cocktail napkin ready to propel them onward into the brave post-correction years. Some are already wearing their 20/20 hindsight glasses and assuring you they knew this would happen all along. The rest of the chattel will simply be cast aside, no longer useful to the helium-filled enterprises scrambling desperately to create enough Intrinsic Value at the last minute before the watermelon falls — like Yelp. This is not a pretty picture:
This is a company in peril, struggling just to stay aloft north of its offering share price at $15 (which, at the time in the still-heady days of 2012, seemed underpriced). Nor is it alone amongst the other star valedictorians of the pre-Bubble 2.0 class who “made it out” into the public markets (p.s. I love this chart from Bloomberg, who nevertheless might want to check its server logs for a Buzzfeed mole):
It’s not a robust crop. It’s more of a sad, slow awakening that we’ve been glamoured once again by the kind of “too good to be true” promises you see in an Outbrain or Taboola module at the end of a story and laugh at the marks who believe that kind of stuff (“just scale as fast as you can and worry about the revenue later!!!” == “The Secret Trick to Paying Off Your Mortgage Early!!1!one1!”); instead, we invested. We Leaned In. We believed, like all economists believe, that if we Just Keep Believing in what smart Money People tell us, everything will be up and to the right, forever and ever, Amen. That markets both act rationally and are completely predictable based on past events. Well, we’re currently in the grips of another Black Swan that indicates otherwise; and if you’re not in possession of enough disposable income, assets, and/or emergency fund to ride out the storm, my advice is that this is one of the worst, most precarious times to follow the mantra of “Go West, Young Man!” — unless you actually fit the description of a Young Man (and besides: there are plenty of other cities that would be more grateful for your help). The other notable exception: if you’re prepared to be available to your employer on demand, regardless of other priorities in your life.
The real gender gap: lack of work flexibility
Women have made real gains in the employment sector thanks to several waves of historical feminism and recently-disparaged social justice warriors fighting for equal rights and opportunity — but still a wage gap remains. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin’s work indicates the disparity is no longer as attributable to the kind of “smoking guns” that revealed the picture in the past, when it wasn’t uncommon for companies to straight up say, “we don’t hire women.” Now the distinction is more subtle — some of it is hiding in the bias of the frame, as Kat Ely elegantly showed earlier, while the bulk of the available data tells a story that is more intertwingled with developments in the “always-on” culture fomented by the tech industry itself: if you have other pressing obligations outside of work (kids, other family caretaking roles, illness, personal financial or logistical crisis, etc.), you’d better find a way to get rid of them if you want to work in the ranks of the Valley rank-and-file.
Thus, in addition to requiring financial support from some other source to make ends meet (or taking on the risk of shoestring living, which itself tends to be a fertile ground for producing the kind of personal crises that drag one away from hours in the office), you also need a physical support network to help with and/or offload any personal commitments to. Single mothers like Jaymee Senigaglia are the sort of “classic case” who find the demands of the Modern Workplace difficult to maintain — unless of course your workplace generously offers to build you a private nursery (sounds like Mayer herself is on the skids with her employer — stay tuned for the forthcoming Angry Medium Open Letter, which should be truly epic).
Meanwhile the prevailing culture of the Valley is that of the young, 20-something male engineer; and the formerly 20-something engineers who exited and now ride the coattails of the younger waves who take their place in the social order to boost their investor mentors into (or further into) the 3-comma club — it’s not entirely unlike the culture of ancient Greece, except without the fantastic orgies (well… at least as far as I know. The Valley tends to be more staid and Apollonian in approach, less Dionysian).
There’s a lot of circularity in this, and some eyebrow-lifting stats are beginning to unmask a part of the Silicon Valley Secret that again, insiders know about but typically enforce strict silence about: it is not actually a meritocracy. It is just as fraught with nepotism, cronyism, bias, and outright sleaze as anyone who’s taken a sociology class would tell you to expect from a tightly insular homogenous ecosystem with an asymmetrical power differential (a political theorist might point you, relatedly, to the concept of social reproduction). It is especially subject to errors in evaluation resulting from heavy reliance on the representativeness heuristic — wherein the probability of a given founder Y succeeding is assumed to be a function of how much Y resembles the members of class X that contains previously successful founders. You probably know what the “X class” looks like:
The problem with this reliance (other than, as psychologist-turned-Nobel-Prize-winning-economist Daniel Kahneman notes, the cognitive distortions and bad decision-making that result) is its self-fulfilling prophecy — compounded by the effect of having no reliable way to measure the counterfactuals (i.e. the outcomes of the members of class Y who were turned down for funding) even if you wanted to: which, typically, you don’t — because of course you’re in the business of Being Right, and why the hell would you go looking for counterevidence?
But money is a honey badger of a CEO, bitch!
One could make an argument that all of Silicon Valley’s prodigal children including Yelp are well within their rights (and god knows many have — the explicit policy facet of the issue is out of scope for this piece) — technically not running afoul of regulation or labor laws (that we know of), and pursuing their self-interest in market value aggressively, if myopically. Plus, we’ve only heard two equally biased sides of today’s story and how things went down in a particular case — but the actual facts of the economic conditions that either talia jane or Jaymee Senigaglia describe aren’t what is in dispute in the ideological battle now raging widely about Silicon Valley’s role within a much broader fabric of stirring political unrest. And even if we take “technical legality” as a given for the sake of argument, two major problems remain:
- The lack of diversity is still hurting companies, whether they recognize it or not. Writ large this hurts the Silicon Valley portfolio as a whole, as we’ve seen thanks to the Bloomberg/Buzzfeed mashup above.
- The second and more morally weighty problem is that, if the Silicon Valley model and technological innovation more broadly are being heralded as the savior to all of our current economic woes, then the glossy marketing version of the story doesn’t hold up once you follow the clickbait and discover that it’s actually a source of some very serious economic woes right now, in its own backyard. If none of that furious, up-all-night, burrito-delivery subsidized innovation can seem to help alleviate the pains wrought by historical economic policy — and in fact appears to be making them worse even within the very Fertile Crescent of progress — then it’s incredibly difficult to see substance behind the hype machine.
An industry that quite literally trades on its rapturous pronouncements of improving everyone’s standard of living, increasing leisure time, and eliminating poverty sets itself up with a higher bar to reach than other industries, by its own decree. By what mechanism is it “eliminating poverty,” and where are the results? Not in the Bay area to be sure.
To see what is proffered as the results, you have to look elsewhere — mostly to China and India, the true beneficiaries of the neoliberal globalization project whose context sets the frame for the fascinating blend of Libertarian-Democrat ideology that pervades the Valley. And even if we ignore all kinds of thorny theoretical problems like teasing apart causality from epiphenomena and measuring counterfactuals within the question of how much Silicon Valley’s efforts contribute to these trends (undoubtedly it does, though as a percentage you are liable to get vastly different evaluations depending on who is asked), you still have to take on faith that the predictions made based on past data will continue to hold true — which, as we saw above with the discussion of large and completely unpredicted Black Swan events, is problematic in a number of ways (turns out rationalism has a faith-based core at its juicy center, though nobody yet knows how many licks it takes to get to it).
Second verse, same as the first
And if this is to be the way of the future, then why in the sam heck does it look even more dismally antiquated than the labor struggles America went through in the early 20th century? Though they didn’t even gain the right to vote until 1919, women flooded into the workforce between 1914 and 1918 out of necessity for the war effort. What was once literally almost unthinkable, and whose probation was rationalized by scholars around the globe for centuries, came to pass regardless: women proved themselves effective contributors to both economic progress and national security in great numbers.
So too do we seem to have forgotten the lessons of 1929 and the New Deal that followed: that the workers in our businesses are the same consumers we need to keep patronizing our businesses, demanding their products, and ensuring future growth versus mere short-term profits. Even for what is a huge swath of advertising-supported businesses where the currency is attention and not discretionary income: time is also a cost. People have to choose to spend it on “paying” attention (no accident, that phrase) to your products — which they will not be doing if they’re busy working 2+ jobs to make ends meet in an increasingly downward spiral of stagnant wages and rising costs. Dramatically rising costs:
It shouldn’t require another war effort to realize that when women have a Real Opportunity to contribute to the economy, the entire nation benefits. One hundred years ago most everyone sneered at the idea of soft, delicate ladies making munitions and riveting airplanes together (to their consternation: we won the war) — and there’s a similarly foul whiff in the air today about whether or not people with two X chromosomes can possibly have an aptitude for coding. For every self-righteous piece of weaponized “advice” about the riches that will literally pour forth from your monitor screen 5 minutes after you fire up Coursera in a browser tab, there are innumerable silent or not-so-silent opinions about a competency bar that extends far into the past, out of reach.
So, let this be a challenge to all of Silicon Valley (maybe there should be some sort of X Prize — whenever Diamandis gets back from regaling India about exponential growth perhaps): if you aim to take a leadership role in the world economy, then you’ll have to step it up and figure out a meaningful way to leverage the contributions of talented people who are not predominantly young men, as well as disproportionately white. If women can build bombs, they can build bots. If they can fix engines, they can handle the MEAN stack.
And, some humility and self-reflection is in order: technological progress has been undone by economic and political instability throughout history — that Up and to the Right graph only continues to hold when a majority of the actors within the system believe it’s working and market volatility does not exceed past data, by economists’ own admissions. The reality of randomness and human behavior holds no guarantee of linear progress.
We know, we know— you only want to hire The Best, and your tireless dedication to overachievement is admirable: but what The Best is can neither be decided nor determined objectively. It’s fraught with all the same biases as the rest of the industry, because we as humans are fraught with it fundamentally and it takes both a commitment and great fortitude to even attempt to counteract. Moreover, an economy that only finds work for The Best has no hope of sustaining itself as a capitalist system — it would be something new, more akin to feudalism but with actually less benefits for the serfs. Nor could it sustain a democracy, with meaningful power concentrated in precious few hands.
It’s disingenuous to promise “Progress for All” without taking any responsibility for determining outcomes — the ethical equivalent of a smoke and mirrors game in which Silicon Valley asks society to believe in the premise, while offloading the responsibility for delivering on the conclusion elsewhere. If the tech industry hopes to avoid being the latest in a decades-long line of failed American leadership examples, then it needs to start leading by example: it needs to outgrow its image as a cabal of young male workaholics.
