I Was Already on Welfare When My Son Spent My Last $100. It Would Make Me a Better Engineer.
Recent court files show that Facebook knowingly let children spend thousands of dollars of their parents’ money on Facebook games. This practice of “friendly fraud” was even encouraged by Facebook employees, according to an investigative report from Reveal.
Before you assume I am writing another piece in the chorus of condemnation of Facebook, I’m not.
I know both sides of this story.
I understand the problem. I believe it is preventable. I want to help, and I want you to help, too.
I am an engineer and engineering manager living in the Bay Area. I’ve never worked at Facebook, but I’ve worked at companies with similar structures. I know how difficult it is to plan for the use cases of a complex platform. I know it’s hard to address every user’s concerns in a scalable and profitable way. I also know that friendly fraud is a technical term that has more precise meaning than many news outlets have implied.
The problem of friendly fraud is not Facebook’s problem. It’s our problem: it’s a problem with the tech industry. And it starts with who we hire.
What Friendly Fraud Really Looks Like
About a decade ago, long before working at a place like Facebook would have been a possibility for me or I even knew what Rails was, I was a single parent. Like many young, single Latinx moms, I was struggling to make ends meet. I got lucky when someone who cared for me sent me $100 gift card for my birthday, which I tucked away for a rainy day. Some months later, with my bank account at zero, I was planning to using it to pay my utility bill. Instead, my thirteen-year-old son found it and spent it on internet games.
You could call that friendly fraud. Or you could call it what caused me to have to use public assistance to keep my lights on.
I didn’t get mad at my son. He couldn’t have known that I needed the money to pay the utility bill. The only thing I could do was move on.
I share that story because it’s not the kind of story I hear often in the gleaming tech offices of the Bay Area. I share that story because it needs to be heard, especially when we make product decisions.
I’m over the term “empathy.” We throw the word around so much that it has become empty. Almost every job posting you see for front-end engineers, product managers, or designers will have a bullet point asking for “empathy for the end user.” But what does that mean? Can you really gain all the empathy you need from user interviews?
There is a better way. It starts with hiring.
I believe the root cause of why Facebook encouraged the practice of friendly fraud is that its workforce is not diverse enough. It was not diverse enough to have true empathy for the thin ice that many families live through every day. If you are lucky enough to be hired at a tech company, chances are high that you grew up in a stable household, and chances are high that spending $100 of your parents’ money didn’t cause the lights to go out. It’s hard to grasp the implications of something like children spending their parents’ money if you haven’t had a direct experience with it. Would the Facebook internal memos had been so cavalier if someone had shared that kind of experience? I’d like to think the answer is no.
Diversity, Broadly
This is not just an indictment of Facebook. It is true of many tech companies, including my own.
Today, I work at eSpark, an education startup. eSpark is a mission-based company focused on supporting underserved students and their schools. You might think that it’s a welcoming place for engineers with my background. But sometimes, even eSpark feels lonely.
There are times I want to connect with people who have had similar experiences, but I know my life has been different from many of my coworkers. I dropped out of high school, I had my son, worked a bunch of different odd jobs, got married, got divorced, went to community college. I’ll share an experience with a coworker and it’s praised in a way — oh, you overcame such odds! — but for me, my life experiences are just like those of the people I grew up with.
I feel lonely when I am seen as something special. I’m not special. In many ways, I am a very typical American. Most of us just don’t work in tech. I got lucky because I happened to come across something that worked for me, engineering, and I happen to be very good at it.
It’s difficult to live with one foot in two different worlds. I make a good salary working in tech, and I’m grateful for that. But I’m still tied to my roots. Last year, I used some of my vacation — yes, it’s paid, and yes, it’s unlimited — helping a relative do mandatory renovations on her house so it wouldn’t be taken from her. It can be hard to talk about that when your coworkers talk about spending their time off wine tasting in Napa.
It’s hard, it’s awkward, it’s sometimes a downer. But I’ve lived enough to know that my experience is an asset.
When I hear tech companies talk about increasing diversity, too often I hear a subtext around making the privileged feel better about themselves. “Diversity is the right thing to do to make up for systematic discrimination,” they say. That’s not wrong. But the point of diversifying our workforce is not to ease the guilt of those who have benefited from the oppression of others. It’s because it makes our companies and our products better.
I am a better engineer and a better leader because of the experiences I have had. Because I homeschooled my son for three years, I can be a strong advocate for accessibility standards in our web applications. Because I have managed my money carefully, I know how to allocate my engineering budget towards meaningful services. Because I have had to take care of my extended family, I know what it means to take care of my team.
I wrote earlier that I want your help in addressing gaps in diversity in tech. Here are three concrete ways to do that:
- Think deeply about how you represent the needs of your users — all of them. Do you know enough about your users to really see them as humans? Surveys and user interviews are great tools. Advisory boards or hiring them to join your team are better.
- Review your job postings. Are you welcoming candidates with the right mix of experiences for your role? Try some tools like Textio that scan your post for gendered language to get a second opinion.
- Take a chance. Do you want to work in tech, but feel like you’re not a traditional fit? Reach out to me at yo@renee.codes and we can have a conversation about where and how your life experiences can be an asset.
Special shout-out to Maya Hope for putting my mouth words into read words. You are a gem.
Also, I’m hiring at eSpark Learning Careers.
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