Then there was the time that I saw one of my regulars in our area. So I came over with my breakfast tray and said hello. He was on his laptop working, and his screen was facing where I was standing. When he saw me, he quickly turned his laptop away and slammed the screen down. And I thought, Honey, nothing on that screen would mean a thing to me. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to understand what I was looking at, let alone interpret any of the code.What was “your area”? Was the place where the massage therapists worked cordoned off from the rest of the company?
We were technically allowed to go anywhere. I had the badge to access all the different floors. But in practice, there was an unspoken, self-policed hierarchy of who was allowed to go where.How did you experience that hierarchy?
There was a really incredible coffee bar on one of the floors. The executive chef at the company was the person who brought in our wellness startup. I think he had a personal connection to one of the founders. For him, his power base in the company lay in the food. So he told us to go to the coffee bar anytime we wanted.
I went there a couple of times, but I never felt comfortable. No matter how many times they told us we could and should go anywhere, I felt like if I ever ventured beyond our little corner of the company, people would just start looking at me like, Who are you and why are you here? You obviously don’t fit. I remember feeling like there were eyes in my back, eyes boring a hole in my back. If I went too deep into a space, if I went over some invisible line, I was like, I’d better turn around and go.Did you and your fellow massage therapists eat at the company cafeteria?
Yup. One of the perks of the job was that we got two free meals there per day.
The galley where you would pick up your food was in the center of the cafeteria. In a U shape around that galley was the seating area. All of the contract workers tended to gather at one of the top ends of the U. Not an ideal place to sit, but that’s where we all felt safe. We could just kind of relax a little bit—the massage therapists, the kitchen staffers, the people who worked at the coffee bar and the juice bar. Not the janitorial staff, though, because they never got to sit down.Did you ever sit with the full-time employees?
The massage therapists were sort of this in-between group in the office because we interfaced with a lot of engineers. They were mostly friendly to us. They treated us better than the kitchen staff, who definitely bore the brunt of the snobbish behavior. But they didn’t want us to sit with them. It felt like high school.
Sometimes an engineer would drift too far into our part of the cafeteria and suddenly realize where he was and immediately pick up his tray and run back toward the other engineers.
The most uncomfortable manifestation of these unwritten rules was what happened with my daughter.What happened?
One day, for some reason, I can’t remember why, my daughter was at work with me. She was a fifth grader at the time and she had some interest in tech and computers and had learned to code over the summer. So I wanted to introduce her to a lovely young engineer, a woman, who I had gotten to know. That woman was brilliant. She had been homeschooled, but I think she was a better coder than all the guys who had gone to the fancy Ivy League schools.
My daughter and I entered the engineering area. It was a big, open floor. There were maybe a hundred engineers at work. And I just remember feeling like I was walking through a fog of “No, get away.” I can’t totally explain it. There’s nothing specific I can point to. I just felt unwelcome. I felt people’s eyes on me. People looking at me like, Who is she and why is she here? And I had a child with me, which I’m sure was unusual.
Anyway, we made it to the desk of this young woman and her male coworker. They were hard at work at their standing desks. They were both very nice, although he seemed a bit uncomfortable. It was awkward. It felt like I had done something wrong. It made me realize that people can be nice, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want you in their space.Do you think your daughter noticed?
No. But I felt so mortified for her. I felt ashamed. I’d clearly made some sort of mistake, some kind of social faux pas.
Later, I got angry. I didn’t want my daughter to be exposed to any of that. That’s fine for me, not for my kids. I didn’t want my child to be touched by this hierarchical crap.Does she still want to work in tech?
She does not.
Closing TimeTell us about how you came to stop working in tech.
At some point, I began to realize that the company wasn’t doing so well. I started to pick up on it with one of my favorites. He always treated me like a regular person. Not putting me on a pedestal, not treating me like a servant—he just took me as I was. And that was actually sort of an exception.
He was a little older than the average engineer, mid to late thirties. Just the sweetest teddy bear of a guy. The company had purchased a food delivery app, and it required a lot of integration, or something. They assigned
