Not Everything Can Be Fixed With Software

Sunil Rajaraman
6 min readJul 17, 2017
Illustration courtesy of Irina Blok.

About a year ago, I released a satirical essay about a fictional day in the life of The Silicon Valley. The piece struck a chord, and I wrote several subsequent pieces that also did well (here, here, here, here, and here). In all, the pieces received millions of pageviews, and all sorts of interesting reactions.

But tech industry satire is hardly new — HBO’s Silicon Valley is a runaway hit. Around the same time I released my piece, Antonio Garcia Martinez became an international bestselling author with ‘Chaos Monkeys’. Sarah Cooper published several successful posts lampooning tech, and Dan Lyons wrote a book about his experiences at Hubspot.

Finance, consulting and politics are notoriously sleazy industries complete with their own scandals (which some may say are on a whole different scale). But instead of getting ridiculed, in many cases the bad behavior within these industries is glorified — complete with memorable movie lines and Leo DiCaprio style.

So why has tech become such an easy target for the rest of the world? Why is everyone laughing at us?

Not every explanation can be condensed to the results of an A/B test.

The tech industry’s stubborn insistence that everything can be fixed with data, code and deregulation has put a gigantic target on our back. It also created an attitude that ignores one inescapable fact — even in this industry — no matter what problem you are working to solve, you are inescapably, painfully human.

And not every problem can be solved by a Stanford CS degree. The technology industry does not in fact have the moral high ground on every issue on the planet.

Human problems require humane, human solutions.

Despite our best efforts, the tech industry was not able to stop a Trump presidency, we definitely have skeletons in our closets and we lack a subtle sensitivity necessary to appeal to the rest of the world. We have all of the depraved and debauched characteristics of other industries, but we are now only beginning to realize how systemic these problems are.

The Pressure and Tension Extend Beyond the Workplace

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