Voices from the Valley

the Oakland teachers.² When they went on strike, they shut shit down. We don’t have the power to do that yet. Maybe one day. But again, it’s hard to keep people organized. Especially now, as our company grows, we have new cooks coming in who don’t know the struggles that we had to go through. And in general, people don’t know much about unions.

Unions used to be a big deal back in the day. They used to be so tough, so fierce, so hard-core. And I get it. I understand why unions were so big. Because they honestly do give you that sense of power if you really listen to the message.

I heard a rumor that some of the white-collar tech workers were thinking about unionizing.That’s right.

That’s crazy to me. But it shows you how wack it is out there. A lot of tech workers are like us to a certain extent.

I knew a tech worker who said she was a contractor like me.³ I didn’t even know that they had tech workers as contractors at those companies. So they feel us. They feel the pain. As I said earlier, the company would rather hire the help to get the help. It’s easier. They don’t want that liability and they don’t want to pay. Because if you’re a contractor, you don’t get those good benefits. You don’t get those perks. It’s kind of fucked-up. So now a lot of the tech workers, they’re feeling like us. And they can’t afford the houses, either, because they’re getting better money than us, but they’re not really getting enough.You work in tech, but how do you use tech in your own life? What do you think of social media, for instance?

I think it’s a little invasive. You know, I’m old-school. I don’t like people in my business. And I don’t care if your daughter is thirteen months and just started walking. That’s none of my business. I really could care less. You don’t have to post that on there. That’s normal to me. I went through that. I saw my son walking when he was ten months.

My son is a clown at times. He’s a teenager now, and teenagers today are more influenced by social media than they are by their parents. A person can get a million views or likes or whatnot for doing something goofy and then become famous in less than a year. My son will see that and think it could be him. But if things don’t work out, now his ass is in trouble, because he did some stupid shit.

When I was a teenager, we didn’t have dating sites. We didn’t have Snapchat and Instagram. I had a pager! I used to have to page chicks “143”—I love you, that goofy shit. Nowadays, these kids are dealing with a whole other beast.

I took his phone away recently. And he’s changing a little bit every day. He actually threw his stuff in the garbage yesterday. I was like, Wow, this is amazing. It’s working already! He’s actually putting shit in the garbage like he’s supposed to!Where do you think Silicon Valley will go next? You’ve seen a huge amount of change since the 1990s. What will the next couple of decades look like?

You ever see Demolition Man, that movie with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes? Where Snipes has blond hair?Yeah.

That could be where we’re going.Damn.

The near future is gonna be hard. Really hard. We’re going to make some changes, with the help of the organizers and the unions and all of the other people that are pushing to make a change. But I worry that it’s too little, too late. I worry that it’s not going to be enough to actually help the people that need to be helped now.

A lot of people are leaving the Bay. A lot of people are leaving California. They’re moving to places where the cost of living isn’t as high, places where you can afford a house and raise a family. That’s the dream, right? You got a house, two kids, a car, and a soccer van, and you’re able to take your kids to the movies. But those other places are gonna turn into here if they make the same mistakes we made: not organizing early, not getting the communities involved early.

They’re having a celebration near here in a park for Cinco de Mayo. If it gets worse, that’s not going to be there. That’s going to be some tech holiday. It might be Bill Gates Day instead of Cinco de Mayo if things get out of hand.

4The Engineer

Google occupies a special spot in the firmament of Silicon Valley.¹ It’s not only one of the region’s most successful companies—it also defines a cultural ideal. Silicon Valley presents itself as a playground for weird geniuses, as a place where creativity, commerce, and a little bit of counterculture fuse to form a new synthesis capable of generating extraordinary wealth. Few companies appear to embody this synthesis better than Google.

Yet over the years, Google has changed. And its transformations have paralleled the broader shifts of the region as a whole, as a generation of companies that saw themselves as eccentric underdogs evolved into corporate leviathans. At Google, this dissonance was especially intensely felt. It became a source of internal tensions, which in turn helped make the company a hot spot for white-collar worker organizing.

There is no better vantage point than Google to observe how Silicon Valley has changed in recent years. We talked to an engineer who spent nine years at the company, and experienced many of these changes firsthand. What happens when Silicon Valley’s golden child grows up? What does it look like for a company to have a midlife crisis?

How did you start using computers?

I didn’t really have a computer growing up. Then, when I was in high school, my parents bought one for their business. You could use the modem to dial into the BBS [bulletin board system] of the