I had an experience, a few days ago, that I just need to speak about.
I was speaking to a recruiter whose reputation as a “fixer” is legendary. I need someone like that, because VC-funded tech is, it turns out, pretty terrible for your career, once you decide to get out of it and find a job for adults. The job hopping that is mandatory in the startup world looks bad to, say, a proprietary trading firm. The no-name companies don’t help much, and (while I’ve managed to overcome this particular problem, by learning a lot on my own) VC-funded tech leads to a lack of useful skills, because using a bunch of different 3-month-old tech stacks– because a 28-year-old CTO read about them on Hacker News– doesn’t make much forward progress. But I digress. This isn’t about that recruiter, or about me, or about the mess that I signed up for when I went into VC-funded tech 7 years ago.
To make it all clear, I admire this recruiter for his honesty, and it’s important that I say this because the next part is going to be a bit shocking. I asked him to review my CV and he said that there was too much emphasis on the teaching components of past jobs. It’s true: I’ve taught Haskell to beginners, spun up a Scala team in a prior company as a consultant, and I’ve presented on a number of mathematical papers to make them more accessible to non-data-scientists (and, in some companies, to chief data scientists). “Cut out the teaching. That’s seen as female work. Focus on what you’ve built and what you’ve managed.”
This recruiter wasn’t being sexist. He agreed that this attitude is abhorrent and anachronistic. He was, simply put, expressing the perceptions that I’d have to overcome if I wanted to be eligible for the top hedge-fund jobs or even the top tech jobs (because, let’s be honest, tech is run by VCs, who are failed finance guys). Alpha males, as the business world sees it, don’t teach and they don’t mentor. They don’t document code or build beautiful interfaces, either. So that work doesn’t get done by people who are trying to become alpha males.
“Focus on what you’ve built”, that I can swallow. But how in the fuck is “managing” superior to teaching, mentoring, and protecting others, all of which are seen as “female”, supportive work? As far as I can tell, the “masculine” part of the management job is mostly the disgusting part. A manager has two roles, the twain in eternal conflict: one is to hold the peasants accountable to the rent-seeking executive nobility, and the other is to support, mentor, protect and lead those being managed. The corporate world often rewards the abhorrent first role, while punishing the good bosses who favor the second. None of that’s news, but I hadn’t, until very recently, seen that as gendered. Now that I’ve seen it, though, I can’t unsee it.
This recruiter was right. The social status and “bossness” that employers increasingly look for as people like me age is heavily weighted on the bad aspects of masculinity. Could you fire people? Did you? Were you feared? Were people so afraid to enter a meeting later than you that they’d fake sick? Did the rent-seeking parasites executives trust you to favor their interests over those of the peasants your reports? The war-oriented work is deemed “masculine” and respected, while the peace-making work is deemed “feminine” and will be undervalued.
Here’s the thing, from my standpoint. Yes, I’m a man. I’d like to think that I’m masculine enough, but I also learn from experience. I’ve been in plenty of workplace wars. I’ve saved the day in crises, fought political fights, won a few battles and lost others. Even the victories were losses. Wars just aren’t worth it. Silicon Valley loves its petty feuds: this is why Hacker News banned me last August, and Quora (at a Y Combinator partner’s request) followed suit in September. Whatever. It’s not worth dissecting, it’s fucking stupid, and I’m just pointing these things out to discuss the ubiquity of tasteless feuds in the tech world. Do I have the energy to fight these silly feuds? Yes. Can I win them (by which, I mean, make the other side lose more)? Almost certainly. Do I intend to do so? No. I’ve had enough of needless war, whether in the tech metagame or inside the workplace. I don’t need to prove my masculinity by starting another war or surviving a stupid crisis. I’d rather avoid wars and crises.
Looking around the software landscape, I’ve come to the conclusion that the neglect of “female work” is a major part of why the industry is such a shitshow. Code goes undocumented, because that’s “female work”. New hires don’t get on-boarded properly, because teaching is “female work”. Culture is ignored, because fixing it would be “female work”. Sitting down to think about what code to write is discouraged, because that’s “female” as well; the “masculine” approach is to “get your hands dirty”, “move fast and break things”. (Two years later, everyone is moving slow because everything is broken.) And so on, and so on.
Here’s what I say: fuck that bullshit. First, the idea that work is “male” or “female” is ridiculous. I work on whatever truly needs to be done. I don’t give a rat’s ass whether it’s male or female or low-class or high-class. If it’s truly worth doing, I fucking do it. I’m far too busy trying to achieve the damn mission to care whether some overpaid piece of shit on the sidelines is going to give me demerits for “wasting time on female work”. Second, the idea that work should be judged inferior because of its gender, or that the female gender is inferior at all, is offensive and just plain morally incorrect. Is this 2015, or 1955?
I don’t have a conclusion for this essay or a solution to this problem. It sucks and it’s stupid, and I really would like to see humanity get beyond this nonsense, but I’ve been in the adult, working world for 10 years and I’ve seen absolutely no progress, so I’m not going to hold my breath.
