Contractors are a fast-growing percentage of the overall tech workforce: at Google, for instance, they constitute the majority. They often endure low wages and difficult working conditions. Nonetheless, many of them also take pride in their craft.
The tech industry places a premium on “technical” skills. But one recurring theme of our conversations is that all work involves technique, whether it is preparing steak for several hundred people or massaging bodies that hours of coding have turned into slabs of concrete.
The contractors in this book have some of the deepest insights into the tech industry and the deepest roots in the Bay Area. They remember the last bubble—the way it changed the landscape and their neighborhoods, the lavish lawns that newly minted millionaires planted and the friends who had to move away so that their homes could be demolished to make space for conference hotels.
Journalists and scholars are starting to pay more attention to more of the people who make up the tech industry. This book aims to give you a fuller picture of their lives, by letting them explain where they came from and why, what they do and what they still hope to do. It also shows how their lives intersect. This book aspires to be representative. It is not exhaustive. It could not be, because Silicon Valley is now everywhere.
Every city wants to have a tech hub. Silicon Beach, Silicon Alley, Silicon Hills, and Silicon Desert—these are ones you may have heard of. Countless other aspirants have not made it as far. But all over the world, politicians and businesspeople are trying to replicate the legendary ecosystem of Northern California. Silicon Valley has long seemed like the last refuge of the American dream.
By the same token, every company wants to be a tech company. JPMorgan Chase employs fifty thousand technologists, two-thirds of whom are software engineers. That’s more engineers than are employed by many big tech firms. Does that make JPMorgan Chase a tech company? The boundaries are becoming difficult to draw.
We still talk about “the” tech industry. But increasingly, tech is a layer of every industry. One by one, farms and factories and oil fields are becoming “smart.” As we reap what we sow, sensors feed data about the seasons into the cloud.
You, too, are being fed to the cloud. As tech enters every industry, it is also entering every aspect of life. Platforms are not only made by people. They are made of people—including you.
It has become almost impossible to avoid being a source of data. You can stay off social media and shop local, and maybe you should. But, as you make your way to the café to meet your old friend, your phone will ping the nearest cell towers. Leave your phone at home, and the security camera on your neighbor’s house will capture your face and relay it to Amazon.
Speak, whoever you are. Your voice is in the Valley, too.
1The Founder
In Silicon Valley, the founder is a sacred figure. Starting a business is seen as the highest form of human achievement. Most startups fail, of course. For the founder, however, failure is never a source of shame. Rather, there is something ennobling about it.
Yet this reverence for the founder feels increasingly untethered from the realities of the industry. Silicon Valley is no longer a scrappy place, if it ever was. It is a land of giants, and their appetite for startups is immense. Huge corporations are constantly acquiring their smaller competitors, or companies that might someday grow into their competitors. This is not only to protect their position, but to nab some of those revered founders themselves, in the hopes that regular infusions of entrepreneurial blood will keep them young and nimble. They, too, were startups once.
We spoke to a founder who cut a successful path through the ecosystem. This person learned to code, landed at an elite university with deep links to tech, became a founder, and failed upward into a company that was too big to fail. Yet along the way, the founder grew disillusioned. Successes started to feel more like failures. Silicon Valley started to feel strange.How did you start writing code?
I went to a perfectly fine public school in Texas. We had a computer science course, but the teacher didn’t know anything about programming. We had a textbook, though, and if you were sufficiently self-motivated, you could work through the exercises and then take the AP exam. Fortunately, there were a few of us who really liked to code. So we got together and taught the course ourselves. We all passed the exam, and it helped me get into an elite institution for college.What did arriving at that elite institution look like?
It was weird. There was a big cultural gap.
I resented my family for not having prepared me for the experience. There were all these kids who went to private schools who were years ahead of me in math. I was angry that I didn’t get those opportunities, and that came out as resentment toward my parents for a while.
I remember going to my college girlfriend’s parents’ house and feeling intimidated by the food they ate and the way they talked. But I also knew I wanted to emulate it. Throughout college, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that nobody could say I wasn’t supposed to be there. That was the particular form that impostor syndrome took for me: it wasn’t about the fear of not being a good programmer, but the fear of not belonging.
The path that college put me on created some distance between me and my parents, though. They have never been anything but proud of me, but they stopped understanding me sometime in college. And in the years since, the gaps between our worlds continue to grow wider.
To this day, when I call my mom on the weekend, she still asks me if I’m off that day, because she doesn’t
