understood that the founders hoped I
would make myself indispensable. I had
never heard the tech incantation “Ask
forgiveness, not permission.”
Soon afterward, the co-founders in-
formed me that the areas where I could
add value would not be active for some
time. They assumed that I wanted to
continue working in tech, and I didn’t
disabuse them of this notion.
O
ne of the e-book startup’s co-found-
ers helped arrange an interview at
an analytics startup in San Francisco.
The role was in customer support, which
I was not particularly excited about, but
it was an entry-level position that re-
quired no programming knowledge. As
a sociology major with a background
in literary fiction and three months of
experience in snack procurement, I as-
sumed I was not in a position to be picky.
The night before the interview, in a
bedroom I’d rented through a millen-
nial-friendly platform for sleeping in
strangers’ bedrooms, I read puff pieces
about the analytics startup’s co-founders,
now twenty-four and twenty-five, with
one Silicon Valley internship between
them and a smart, practical dream of a
world driven by the power of Big Data.
A renowned seed accelerator in Moun-
tain View had offered funding and
connections in exchange for a seven-
per-cent stake, and the C.E.O. and the
technical co-founder left their college
in the Southwest to join. The startup
had twelve million dollars in venture
funding, thousands of customers, and
seventeen employees.
In the office, the manager of the
Solutions team, a hirsute man with a
belly laugh, presented me with a series
of questions and puzzles. A wiry sales
engineer showed me how to write a
function that rearranged the characters
in a long string of letters. The techni-
cal co-founder watched me complete
a reading-comprehension section from
the LSAT.
The offer included company-paid
medical and dental coverage and a start-
ing salary of sixty-five thousand dol-
lars a year. The Solutions manager did
not mention equity, and I didn’t know
that early access to it was the primary
reason people joined startups. Eventu-
ally, the company’s in-house recruiter
recommended that I negotiate a small
stake, explaining that all the other em-
ployees had one.
Friends at home told me that they
were excited for me, then asked whether
I was sure I was making the right de-
cision. The media tended to cover tech
as a world of baby-faced nerds with uto-
pian ambitions and wacky aesthetic pref-
erences, but to my friends it was a Wall
Street sandbox. I stuck to the narrative
that working in analytics would be an
experiment in separating my profes-
sional life from my personal life. Maybe
I would start the short-story collection
I had always wanted to write. Maybe I
would take up pottery. I could learn to
play the bass. I could have the sort of
creative life that creative work would
not sustain. It was easier to fabricate a
romantic narrative than to admit that I
was ambitious—that I wanted my life
to pick up momentum.
S
tartups in New York were eager to
create services for media and finance;
software engineers in the Bay Area were
building tools for other software engi-
neers. The analytics platform enabled
companies to collect customized data
on their users’ behavior, and to manip-
ulate the data in colorful, dynamic dash-
boards. I’d had some guilt about the op-
portunism of the e-book startup, but
had no qualms about disrupting the Big
Data space. It was thrilling to see a cou-
ple of twentysomethings go up against
middle-aged leaders of industry. It
looked like they might win.
I was employee No. 20, and the fourth
woman. The three men on the Solutions
team wore Australian work boots, flan-
nel, and high-performance athletic vests;
drank energy shots; and popped Vita-
min B in the mornings. The Solutions
manager assigned me an onboarding
buddy, whom I’ll call Noah—employee
No. 13—a curly-haired twenty-six-year-
old with a forearm tattoo in Sanskrit.
He struck me as the kind of person who
would invite women over to listen to
Brian Eno and then actually spend the
night doing that. I spent my first few
weeks with Noah carting around an
overflowing bowl of trail mix and a
rolling whiteboard, on which he pa-
tiently diagrammed how cookie tracking
worked, how data were sent server-side,
how to send an HTTP request. He gave
me homework and pep talks. Our team-
mates handed me beers in the late af-
ternoon. I was happy; I was learning.
The first time I looked at a block of
code and understood what was happen-
ing, I felt like a genius.
W
e treated the C.E.O., a twenty-
four-year-old with gelled, spiky
hair, like an oracle. The child of Indian
immigrants, he mentioned, not infre-
quently, his parents’ hope that he would
finish his undergraduate degree. In-
stead, he was responsible for other adults’
livelihoods.
On Tuesdays at noon, we would roll
our desk chairs into the middle of the
office and flank him in a semicircle, like
children at a progressive kindergarten,
for the weekly all-hands. Packets con-
taining metrics and updates from across
the company were distributed. We were
doing well. An I.P.O. seemed imminent.
The engineers had built an internal Web
site to track revenue, which meant that
we could watch the money come in in
real time. The message was clear and
intoxicating: society valued our contri-
butions and, by extension, us. Still, the
C.E.O. motivated us with fear. “We are
at war,” he would say, his jaw tense. We
would look down at our bottles of kom-
bucha and nod gravely. At the end of
the meeting, the packets were gathered
up and shredded.
Camaraderie came easily. We all felt
indispensable. Failures and successes
reflected personal inadequacies or indi-
vidual brilliance. Slacking off was not
an option. Research did not necessar-
ily support a correlation between pro-
ductivity and working hours beyond a
reasonable threshold, but the tech in-
dustry thrived on the idea of its own
exceptionalism; the data did not apply
to us. We were circumventing the fuss-
iness and the protocol of the corporate
world. As long as we were productive,
we could be ourselves.
I did not want to be myself. I envied
58 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
