The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/secret-shame-of-an-unacquired-techie.html

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

122 82 12 years ago

LaurensBER• 12 years ago

It's a bit hard to make sense of this story. Google might not think that her UX/Design talent is a good fit for them (the Design and engineering teams at Google are "separate" from what I've seen). That doesn't say anything about her.

I also don't really think that the part about her rich boyfriend is relevant and it feels a bit weird that the article mentions it. She also sounds very, very negative towards the end of the article. Some of my friends in other sectors have applied to 100 jobs, received one offer and got fired after 6 months because of budget cuts. They still get up every day and try again.

If I was her I would ask why they didn't hire me (feedback is always useful), take the 10k. Travel for a month and get ready to try again. I get that it hurts but working for a startup company the possibility of failure is always around the corner and "selling" to Google and getting some money doesn't sound like the worst way to fail.

vellum2• 12 years ago

The article mentioned her boyfriend because:

her financial cushion had made it easier for her colleagues to leave her behind.

"Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend," she said.

mblack682• 12 years ago

It was seeming proof that even within the happy-go-lucky world of tech start-ups, there are winners and losers, and more often than not, the losers in situations like these are the designers, who are more likely to be female than their engineer counterparts, and whose "soft" skills are seen as less valuable than coding chops.

If a field is dominated by women, the pay tends to be less. Anecdotal, no proof. But this rule of thumb has worked for me. I am often asked to do UI and design stuff. I could be good at it, but I refuse to do it because it shunts me into a lower paid position. I stick to programming and don't allow my male counterparts to make the assumption that I will do their prettifying.

Design work is necessary, and I enjoy my attempts at it on personal projects. If it were my dream job, maybe I would feel differently? I don't know. I just know that as someone who is viewed as "creative", my personal experience is that the stereotype is stunting.

badman_ting• 12 years ago

Agreed, and that is shrewd thinking, though I'm not sure if it is related to gender. It may be part of it, but I think also design is a more attractive job than coding which is gross and technical, so there are more people who want to do it -> more labor supply -> lower pay.

Same thing with games, tons of people grow up playing them and want to make them -> more supply of workers -> get paid & treated like crap.

theorique5• 12 years ago

It is definitely a supply demand thing. Lots of people go to art/design school, and jobs are scarcer.

Also, look at your average consumer/business startup - by the time you get to 10-20 coders, you might have one full-time designer. Maybe. Or a freelancer whom you bring in for a project when you need them.

disbelief• 12 years ago

I have to disagree. Designers who can actually write serious code are rare unicorns and can typically demand a higher salary because of it. I wouldn't downplay my design skills (if I had any). I'm not sure what your pay grade is at the moment, but an engineer that can design is worth more than someone who is solely a designer or engineer in my books. Maybe it depends on the size/type of company? A small-ish company or startup would be more likely to value someone with multiple toolsets, whereas larger companies look more for specialists.

mblack682• 12 years ago

The problem is, once you demonstrate skills in creative, if you are female, that's now your label. Period. At least, that's my personal, anecdotal experience.

dnlbyl• 12 years ago

The article really tries to make this about her gender when on the face of it it's about her role. "she had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her male colleagues made" doesn't sound as bad when stated as "the designer had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her engineering colleagues made".

I'm sure I'd feel pretty bad too if I was in her place. I hope she can get through it and learn and grow from the experience.

mrxd• 12 years ago

The average salary for a UX designer in Mountain View is 7% less than an engineer.

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=User+experience+designer&l1=...

mh_yam• 12 years ago

Could be any number of reasons for this. Salary is surprisingly rigid over time for many because people simply don't like negotiating. Women especially negotiate less than men. Maybe she had a $40k salary at her previous job and $60k looked like an amazing deal when in reality is is way below market. Who knows...

johnny99• 12 years ago

Depends tremendously on experience level, whether or not the designer can implement in code (ie, works in HTML/CSS rather than Photoshop), and other important factors.

Having recently hired both designers and engineers, I can say with confidence that the pay differential is a hell of a lot more than 7%. Double is absolutely plausible.

steveklabnik2• 12 years ago

There is a pretty high correlation between gender and roles at technology companies...

"You see, it's not that women get paid less than men... it's that women are designers, and men are programmers, and programmers make more than designers!"

It does sound as bad. The lack of appreciation for 'non-technical' employees labor is pretty sad. I am highly technical, and the designers on my team are the most valuable ones in my eyes... they can do something I can't.

All roles help build the company.

theorique5• 12 years ago

Those statistics and environment aren't something that companies individually create, though. They are just responding to supply and demand for those different roles. And while a web/graphic designer may indeed be valuable to a team, (1) there are probably a lot fewer of them than coders, and (2) their average compensation is probably lower than the average compensation of coders.

The issue really needs to be addressed earlier - at the high school, and college level, when girls start to drop out of technical course work.

patmcc• 12 years ago

>>All roles help build the company.

This is true, but rightly or wrongly roles are compensated very differently. A successful tech company probably needs programmers, designers, testers, customer support, managers, ops, etc. It would be an odd company (though not necessarily a bad one) that paid all those employees the same. Remember that the wage paid to a person is somewhere between 'what I must pay to hire a decent candidate' and 'how much value they actually add', and usually skews towards the former.

kenjackson2• 12 years ago

It sounds like she sort of got a raw deal, IMHO. Although I blame Google less, and more her company. For a company this small I don't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone. Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.

Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

For a company this small I don't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone.

I doubt you'd get that. As of 2011, Google's pretty firm on regular employees of acquisitions being contractors first, and sub-80 conversion rates happen.

Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.

I agree. They should have done that.

I think the founders took a deal that was good for them and failed to make sure it worked for everyone. She got a crappy severance; they got jobs at twice what they'd get under normal terms. Not that it excuses their betraying her, I think they were probably a bit panicked about their own job security.

Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.

They saved themselves. You could say that they weren't leaders, then. It's unclear what their other options were.

nissimk3• 12 years ago

It's typical bad business. At such a small firm especially when the employees are underpaid with the expectation of some large payoff in the future, the management should ensure that there is a positive outcome for all of their employees. Unfortunately, this frequently does not happen. This scenario is similar to when companies sell out for a per share value below the employee stock option strike price and the senior people all have stock so they get paid while all of the option holders get nothing. Or the startup that fired a lot of their employees with unvested options just prior to the ipo announcement.

These things happen and they are upsetting. There are many bad operators who wouldn't think twice about screwing over the people who helped them get where they are. On the other hand, there are folks who will try to do their best to make sure everyone comes out ok and these are the people who you should try to seek out.

smartician• 12 years ago

Do acqui-hires go through the same rigorous hiring process as regular hires at Google? I wonder how many engineers that are hired as part of an acquisition would actually pass the infamously hard interviewing process at Google.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

As of 2011: regular employees convert to contractors (red badges) and have 12 months to prove themselves. Obviously, executives get a sweetheart deal they arguably don't deserve.

rdl2• 12 years ago

What are the financial terms? i.e. would people who don't convert lose everything due a a 1 year cliff?

tensafefrogs• 12 years ago

It varies by deal. If you are a hot-shit growing company, you obviously have more leverage to negotiate for your employees and can get them full-time positions with good retention bonuses/stock.

If you are running out of money and don't have a choice, then your employees are probably going to be rolled into an existing product, and at that point, there's probably not a lot of benefit to Google to hire sub-par employees, so they may not get an offer or might get less than in the above case.

It also depends on what your team does: A failing company that does hard core research and employs a bunch of Phds might be worth a lot more than a random social startup that just employs a bunch of randos.

sunir2• 12 years ago

I'm really dismayed by this story, because it reminds me of too many conversations with young professionals who are stuck in their career because they are not professionally developing out of some inner rage. Quoting:

"Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else wrong with her application."

If you go through life believing that any prejudice (sexism, in this case) is dominating your career growth, you will always look for it in the tea leaves, project it onto any situation, and in return invite it. In truth, the person who is prejudiced is you.

You have to live your life assuming good faith unless you have direct evidence of bad faith. You're crippling yourself to assume an ethereal, non-specific, constant prejudice against you because you are putting the locus of control outside yourself.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

In fact, in Amy's words:

"I feel like I have no power, that this happened to me, and it’s my fault," she said. "I feel so betrayed. And, at this point, I don't really feel like I have it in me to fail again."

It's critical as a professional to believe that the situation is something specific, direct, and within you sphere of influence, so you can look to ways to improve.

In this situation, if you start with the assumption no one was being sexist, it's not that difficult to identify the most probable reason she was not hired and her salary was lower. Google acquihired the engineering team; she was a designer. Therefore, she was not hired.

If you see that as a cause, then it becomes easier to think of ways to improve, such as gaining software development skills or taking on a larger and larger product design roles to make yourself more valuable as an employee. Or just looking for another job.

Of course, they could have been sexist towards her, but the article doesn't provide direct evidence, only Amy's perception of their attitude, which I fully trust she believes is fact even though I also believe she is just projecting.

"'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said."

The lesson in an nutshell is to never assume prejudice. Only draw that conclusion from direct evidence.

kenjackson2• 12 years ago

For better or worse, disadvantaged minorities always have to consider this. It's probably one of the biggest privileges that white males have in day to day life -- they rarely need to consider if race/gender played a role in any decision they encounter.

There was an interesting experimental study that showed that a white male just released from prison was as likely to get a job callback as a black male with no criminal record [1].

There are typically multiple factors at play for any employment decision, but race and gender loom very large -- large enough that ignoring it is just ignorance.

And note, that the domain matters. Jeremy Lin faced discrimination as a basketball player being Asian. But for most domains, being a white male is preferred.

[1] Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment, Am Sociol Rev. Oct 1, 2009; 74(5): 777–799, http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ASR_pager_etal09.pdf

sunir2• 12 years ago

First, not everyone here is a white male.

Second, statistics that measure the state are not direct evidence. Individual cases may or may not fit. There may be statistics that measure a company that demonstrate a bias, but unless you have direct evidence of that, it's better to not burden your mind with that negativity.

Third, you aren't a statistic. You have to keep developing and getting better. Don't internalize the statistical oppression. Internalization is the worst form of oppression.

mseebach• 12 years ago

There is a big difference between considering prejudice and then assuming it in the face of a plausible, alternative explanation.

Crake• 12 years ago

disadvantaged minorities always have to consider this. It's probably one of the biggest privileges that white males have in day to day life

White males can be minorities, too.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

This was very similar to my thinking as well. If you look for reasons you will find them. The simplest explanation was the acquisition was for $X + All engineers. It was stated that the acquisition was done under duress (the company was out of money) She wasn't an engineer, she wasn't part of the deal. I would wonder why as a founder she wasn't part of the discussion with Google but that certainly can happen when its just the board (typically CEO and the early investors doing the discussion). Depending on the culture the CEO may or may not bring the other founders into the process.

So this is the mind disease that "Amy" needs to cure:

   > "I feel like I have no power, that this happened to
   >  me, and it’s my fault," she said. "I feel so
   >  betrayed. And, at this point, I don't really 
   >  feel like I have it in me to fail again."

She didn't "fail" any more than the rest of the group "succeeded", it was a business transaction and had nothing to with her and everything to do with Google hiring more engineers. She now has a CEO type person who she can note as someone who doesn't have her interests at heart (the company representative in the negotiation should have gotten her a decent severance package from the deal) and she's been through a company from start to finish so she has an idea of what it takes. Armed with that experience and, if she's spent some time processing it, wisdom, she is in a position to start again and potentially be more effective. What part of the marketing worked? What part didn't? Were the traction issues product or messaging related? Did they reach their target audience? If not why not? Do the whole post mortem thing and learn.

I've been doing this a long time and know it is rarely "about you." You're resume now has a startup with a "successful" exit (acquired by Google), almost everyone reading it will know that is a better outcome than Chapter 7 bankruptcy. (everyone went home and got nothing) You get the respect of having 'been around the block.' which is awesome. So if you do go into a startup situation again, this time as part of the negotiation you say to your potential boss, I want it in my offer that we're acqui-hired and they decide not to hire me, I'll get 6 months severance with benefits so that I can work on my next thing. That is an "easy" thing to agree too since it both clarifies your position in a future acquisition strategy, and it only pays off when the company is being acquired. The second startup I did the Marketing VP had this in their agreement because they knew, as marketing, they were associated more with the product/space and not simply tech talent that could easily be re-purposed[1].

Bottom line, it isn't you, it's never about you, its about what the company wants. Move along. For grins and giggles though check in with your engineer colleagues to see if they would have preferred not to be hired later on. Often such acquisitions include a "retention" clause which, in practice, means the acquiring company can put you (an engineer) on really crappy projects that nobody else wants and you're going to do it anyway because you're locked in for some amount of time to get your bonus. A friend of mine, who has been acquired by Cisco twice, we would ask "So, how long are you in for?" because for an entrepreneur, being stuck at BigCorp for 18, 24, or 36 months really wasn't a vacation.

[1] That engineers are fungible and marketing folks are not is of course not true but a lot of technical acquisitions treat it like it is I've found.

pistle• 12 years ago

EXACTLY! Blame the disenfranchised for their doubts and concerns. They probably got that way by watching movies or something. It's almost never based in a history of exploitation.

ef43• 12 years ago

I've grown keenly aware of the gender disparities in tech and it's an issue I care about fixing.

Which is why I want the "tech undervalues non-coders" meme to stop getting dragged into these gender discrimination discussions. It muddies the waters and only serves to discredit the person bringing it up in the eyes of technology people who still need to be convinced that we have a gender discrimination problem.

A similar example I saw recently at (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sex-and-the-startup-men-w...) put it clearly:

"The roots of the vast gap in power and value between men and women in Silicon Valley begin very early in the life-cycle of a startup, often before the startup officially has employees or executives. For example, in a company like Facebook... women from the beginning of the company did work that had not yet been conceived or compensated as work. Women who casually dated the founders before the company had employees found themselves doing everything from recruiting engineers from their social networks, mediating founder relationships and disputes, providing product feedback, designing social events, and performing emotional and affective labor."

"When startups begin hiring employees, the fact that nontechnical work may have been originally done for free by friends often leads founders to continue to devalue that labor, considering it optional or “fun,” perhaps a matter of social obligation, rather than serious and valuable. Engineers become highly prized commodities to hunt and value highly, while labor that isn’t technical is often expected to be freely performed by people who may have other jobs at the company (such as administrators) or who may not have any job at the company at all (such as girlfriends and dates). And because this labor often goes underpaid or not paid at all, it also doesn’t signify when equity is divided up."

The author of that needs to ask: why can you find people to do the non-coding work for free or cheap, but you can't find people to do the coding for free or cheap? It has everything to do with the supply and demand of skills. Developers are still more scarce than all those other roles. Full stop.

We absolutely need more powerful women in tech -- by letting more women become great coders. Not by pretending coding ability doesn't matter.

phillmv3• 12 years ago

You're missing out entirely on the point of the article.

The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand".

It's ultimately shitty that everyone in the company but the designer got to fail upwards and land in cushy jobs while she got $10k and a pat on the head. Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?

You need one designer for every 3 or 4 programmers, but that doesn't mean you still don't need good designers or that their individual contribution is automatically less valuable.

natrius• 12 years ago

"The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand"."

It's an interesting hypothesis, but I haven't seen any data to back it up. The common sense explanation seems like it fits. Work that can be done by lots of people gets lower (or zero) wages. If the problem were women getting underpaid, we'd see the same problem among female developers. Do we?

Designers are worth less in an acquihire. As a result, designers should demand wages that are closer to the market rate than developers do when they work for startups.

ef43• 12 years ago

Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?

So why do the developers get paid more than other (white male) workers who work longer hours doing harder work? Because "long hours" and "sacrifice" have absolutely nothing to do with what anyone gets paid.

Your pay is not a function of just yourself. It's a function of every other person who could have done your job instead. The more of them there are, and the worse their other alternatives, the lower your wages will be.

theorique5• 12 years ago

Developers are still more scarce than all those other roles. Full stop.

Nail on the head. These weakly compensated "office coordinator" or "customer service" roles aren't weakly compensated because they skew toward females. They are weakly compensated because they can be.

Try to pay a female engineer $30K when she has offers from other places for 3x more than that. She'll laugh in your face.

thanatropism5• 12 years ago

What you just said, plus this:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html

"....not all women are the target demo of Randi's lip synching, the CEO of General Dynamics is a woman, I think she has a higher security clearance than the entire Senate, and I know for a fact she builds alien spaceships, why not interview her about how she uses social media to promote her brand and make connections and break ceilings? Because there's no Like button for hard work or triple integrals, which is doubly interesting because calculus was invented to make hard work easier. "I just don't get math." Can't do math if you weren't taught to think logically, and logic is tough on kids' self esteems and makes them way less submissive, easier just to put on a video. "They're obsessed with the Wiggles." And apple juice, whose fault is that? So instead of "if you do the same amount of hard work as everyone else, you should end up in the exact same boat as everyone else, and it will sink because none of you know anything about boats," we get Randi Zuckerberg, a lot, who tells us about the occupational hazards of posting baby pictures"

theorique5• 12 years ago

Any relation to the famous Zuckerberg?

vxNsr2• 12 years ago

That post is literally impossible to read. Not only does he fail to stay on topic for huge swaths of the entry, but he goes egregiously off topic multiple times within the same sentence.

I'm also not sure I understand the larger point after reading the rest of the quoted section. Is it women aren't doing the right jobs? Women aren't respected? Women don't respect themselves? He touched on all these ideas at some point in the section. Or is it something totally different?

frodopwns• 12 years ago

I can't say I am surprised. Google probably needs about 1 designer for every 50 engineers. They could have given her a year though.

endtime• 12 years ago

The following is personal opinion/experience and I do not represent Google, etc.

My experience at Google is that we love hiring women both for SWE roles and PM roles. All three tech leads I've had over 2.5 years have been women, and I've worked with about as many female PMs as male ones. However, we generally hire PMs with a solid technical background (often a CS major or minor), which the author doesn't mention and so I assume does not have. I would be flabbergasted if she wasn't hired because she's a woman.

zengr• 12 years ago

I don't think this has to do anything with Amy being a woman. I personally know about 2 cases where a silicon valley big corp company interviewed employees before an acquisition and let go some of them. Maybe because they are not that important for the job.

steven2012• 12 years ago

"Talking through her tears on Monday night, Amy said she didn't know if she'd be able to recover from what she considered the worst setback of her professional life. After what happened at Google, she wasn't even sure she could bring herself to interview for another job."

One of my friends lost his job during the dot-com bust. He was married only a few weeks earlier. He was on an H1B and about to get kicked out of the country. He couldn't find a job anywhere because of the bust. He paid money to a body shop to keep his H1B "active", and then he got whatever jobs he could for 2 years, moving around CA taking the shittiest jobs just so that he had money for his family. He went from a software engineer to pumping gas during the midnight shift in Redwood City and getting paid under the table, just so that he would have money. Finally after two years, he got a break and got a job at a big tech company, moved to Austin, and is thriving in his job, made senior manager, and has 3 kids. He suffered great indignities just to survive and to make money and his perseverance paid off, thankfully.

To hear this person say they don't know if they can never interview again because they weren't good enough to join Google, and they would look bad in front of their rich friends, frankly it sickens me. No wonder the hate of Silicon Valley is increasing in these past few years, it's producing people like this that can't take the fact that their feelings were hurt.

ebiester• 12 years ago

What we say in the emotional raw state is not what is going to determine our future. Otherwise, I would have given up more times than I can count. :)

And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"

nissimk3• 12 years ago

And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"

If she doesn't know how to spin that, she should get someone to help her out because it's really just a matter of perception. I'm no communications expert but I'd start with "Google wanted engineers," "Google was looking for a different skillset," etc. This is the type of thing that a good recruiter can actually really help with.

silencio• 12 years ago

He suffered great indignities just to survive and to make money...

Not sure this is a popular opinion, but I feel like a lot of white-collar workers should go work blue-collar jobs once in a while, even if for a day. Indignities are trying to bribe companies to keep a visa valid, not so much working low paying jobs, and perseverance doesn't help others that have no better out like everyone wants you to believe. Which is a huge shame.

I co-own a fast food restaurant, and I try to spend a half day every week there in person making sure things are going okay. People do a double take and then some when they discover that my day job is really as a software developer because they don't expect me to stand around at the counter or flip a burger like the $10/hour employees because I have a six figure income so I could fuck off very easily. People also treat me with way more respect afterwards - totally different from "you're the boss" is "you're the boss but you have a super swank other job". Everyone from random steady customers to like, those (insert major tech company) employees that came in the other day while I was madly typing away on my laptop during a slow hour and the 15 year old punks that just got out of school calling me a "bitch" (..."I want a burger") to "what are you doing, you type really fast" to "yes ma'am, I'm sorry, also that's really cool!!" in a matter of minutes.

Me working hard at the same job is assumed to have a good payoff in the end (maybe my also-programmer husband and I can eventually afford a nice house in SF...lol) while my employees working harder than me is assumed to be terrible - "why are you still a burger flipper" with what time and money to become better even if I try to pay them decently and work with their schedules? I even put out a job posting for more summer hires recently and got a whole slew of people with degrees - including ones with MBAs and a CS degree that I emailed instead with "wanna talk to a tech recruiter?" Sigh...

neilk• 12 years ago

It may not have been any better for her if she joined. A friend of mine was an evangelist of a startup, acquired by Google for their technology. She was humiliated by having to essentially re-apply for her job and be ejected a few months later. (Incidentally, this woman is an accomplished programmer and project leader, but not quite the C++ rock star that Google looks for).

As for the OP's case - we only have only her side of the story. If the team jettisons one of their own when acquired, it may be that they are contemptible, or that she is and they were happy to get rid of her. Or, possibly both.

gozmike• 12 years ago

Faced with a similar prospect in my small company, the founders agreed (in writing) to set aside a portion of their proceeds (including a portion of gross salary) to ensure that payments were made to anyone on the team who was not hired.

In my opinion, even if your teammate doesn't "need the money", it's important that you express how valuable they have been to you (for even just believing in your journey and sticking through it).

001sky• 12 years ago

A nice gesture like this done before the fact helps mitigate perception problems. The problem is "damaged goods" repulation, its not the "rejection". New hiring managers will silently discriminate against her (surely). By giving your employees something to point to, you are being more responsible in how you do the buyout transaction. I actually don't agree with the view that this is some type of mis=placed "entitlement", because the problem is a real problem regardless of who it impacts. Although she also shouldn't over-worry if she's falling into a hot market with a strong support network.

mynewwork2• 12 years ago

What a ridiculously terrible article.

The company "decided to sell itself to Google as a last resort, after failing to find traction in the market". But the engineers got hired, so probably the product was good but the failure was in marketing, branding, etc. Who was in charge of that? "I did our user experience, our logo, the marketing – all that stuff," she said.

So the article could have been written "Strong technical team makes valuable product, but bad marketing and UI prevents success" and no one would be surprised that the engineers got hired and the marketing & design people didn't.

But that wouldn't fit with the sexism in tech narrative the author wanted, so let's ignore the most significant and obvious facts.

prodigal_erik• 12 years ago

Being acqui-hired means the company managed to recruit a team that's probably decent, but failed to do anything substantially more valuable than that. If the product were inherently strong they'd continue it with different marketing staff.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

Your notion that good programmers = good product is absurd. As is your rush to blame somebody for failing to find traction.

If a startup fails to find traction, there's no clear reason to blame anybody. Most startups do that.

mynewwork2• 12 years ago

I edited my comment several times and I think the message I was originally trying to convey got less clear as a result.

I don't for a moment believe the startup actually failed due solely to the designer. And yet, it's more likely that the designer just wasn't google-quality than libelling google by claiming it was sexism that caused them to hire a few engineers but not the designer from a failed startup.

elchief• 12 years ago

I'm getting tired of these stories.

If you want to make more money, try to train in and work in a field that makes more money.

thanatropism5• 12 years ago

Relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0

Coffee's for closers.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

You realize that he's not a positive role model, right?

evan_• 12 years ago

The first time I heard about "Secret" I thought it sounded awful, and assumed it would be full of spiteful gossip and behind-the-back-talking, and decided I'd never use it and would ignore anything I learned that was sourced from it.

Anyway recently a friend showed it to me on their phone and it turns out it's actually full of banal not-interesting-enough-for-twitter observations, obviously made-up half-jokes, and trite glurge nonsense that sounds like it was stolen from my grandmother's email forwards. In a way, this reality is even worse.

onmydesk• 12 years ago

"'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said

She wasn't an engineer. Perhaps they wanted engineers. Whats wrong with pointing out she happens to be cared for financially so won't have that to worry about? Its not the reason, its a fortunate circumstance.

Playing the sexism card is in rather poor taste. Did she complain when they took her on board because she suspected there was positive discrimination at play?

Doing 'the logo' and 'all that stuff' is suitably vague. Is she not fortunate to have got away with coining 60k for a lowly role in the first place?

nissimk3• 12 years ago

I didn't get that. It looked to me like she took 60k at the startup instead of a higher number at a more established company with the expectation that she'd get paid out the difference at the exit. Isn't that the risk/reward expectation of startup employment?

And what's wrong with pointing out her external financial situation is that it is not relevant to the decisions of the business. Is it less wrong to screw over a girl with a rich boyfriend than it is to screw over anybody else?

thanatropism5• 12 years ago

Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else wrong with her application

Because she's not an engineer. The company folded, the underlying tech may have some value. The branded design? Her years of toil? Did the company have a cleaning person for the office as well?

Someone post this to /r/TumblrInAction already.

protomyth• 12 years ago

The actual link has a lot more comments than the published story https://www.secret.ly/p/feexnrnpunzjadkhinaegigziy

I would love to hear the other side, but I cannot help but think leaving one of your team to fend for themselves is not exactly the act of a standup person.

jqm• 12 years ago

It sucks and I feel for Amy. Then again, she did make 60K a year for period. As a designer. And 10K isn't much but it's enough to buy a few nice things.

Really, I guess I don't feel that sorry. People work their hearts out all over the world for little more than subsistence. Work and business is brutal and full of millions of sad stories.

The level of self entitlement displayed by the "startup culture" is astounding at times.

The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker

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