Book Review
Reset
By Ellen Pao
A few months ago, I got super frustrated reading “The Coming Software Apocalypse” in The Atlantic. I will summarize it to save you the frustration. Software is growing too complex, the author argues, leading to catastrophic failures that no one understands. The only way to fix this is to listen to a few Lone Technology Visionaries, each breathlessly introduced with a long list of credentials.
I agree with the first part. I’m repulsed by the second. A lot of writers like to burnish the myth that the technology industry is driven by Ayn Randian supermen who see a future that the rest of us don’t. This simply isn’t true: engineering is a team sport. We bring together people with disparate expertise and put that knowledge together into a cohesive product.
But it is worth thinking through why the “technology visionary” myth exists, and who benefits from it.
“Reset” by Ellen Pao is its own kind of superhero story. Pao starts out as a rugged individualist. She believes in the meritocracy, to the point of naïveté. When she first starts out working in venture capital, she asks a colleague for advice about how to succeed:
“You should definitely not go to networking events,” he said. “They’re really worthless and not worth your time […]”
Being junior and new to the venture, I didn’t know any better. I appreciated his advice and did as he said[…] Looking back on it now, I can see that advice for what it was: sabotage.
The arc of the book is Pao’s realization how false that advice was. The “titans of industry” story is a cover for the boys’ club of influence and deals that actually runs the industry.
Most of the book describes gender discrimination at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, her decision to file a lawsuit, and the trial.
Her early faith in individualism is used against her.
When one of the firm’s partners harasses her, she doesn’t tell anybody for years. When she finally does tell a friend, the friend reveals that she had been harassed in the same way by the same person.
Later, at the trial, she hesitates to have people testify on her behalf. She doesn’t want their careers harmed. Meanwhile, the opposition’s legal team attacks her character and her competency. They shame her in the press to warn off future accusers.
Pao slowly figures out how to succeed by building better alliances.
She becomes CEO of Reddit and builds a team. They’re sad at the way at the way Reddit has been devolving into 4chan, with subreddits entirely focused on harassing other Redditors. Her team works together to identify the five worst subreddits and bans them. They send a message that this behavior won’t be tolerated on the platform.
She loses the trial. That’s not the end of the story. The last chapter of the book is a montage of bringing the Project Include team together. To abuse the superhero theme, it feels like bringing the Avengers together. They set out to fix diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.
That’s a weird note to end a book on. The future looks bleak. To quote Erica Baker’s “Tech Diversity and Inclusion Post-mortem”: “We have not defined what good outcomes look like. We have not created any methods of accountability.”
But, as in any engineering project, we need a great team working together to fix it.
