62 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
logo and the words “SECRET SERVICE”
showed me to the waiting room, a
meticulous replica of the Oval Office.
The wallpaper was striped yellow and
cream. An American flag stood to the
side of the Resolute desk, behind which
an animation of clouds passing over the
National Mall played on a screen. The
rug, a deep Presidential blue, was em-
blazoned with the startup’s mascot, a
tentacled, doe-eyed octopus-cat cross-
breed, holding an olive branch above
the words “IN COLLABORATION WE
TRUST.” The company had attracted a
hundred million dollars in venture fund-
ing, and appeared to be spending it the
way most people would expect three
men in their twenties to spend some-
one else’s money.
The offer letter arrived. “We’re ex-
pecting big things from you, ourselves,
and for the company,” it read. “You
should be justifiably proud.” Mostly, I
was burned out. The open-source com-
pany was famous for its culture, which
atypically emphasized work-life balance.
For years, in emulation of the tenets of
open source—transparency, collaboration,
decentralization—the organization had
been nonhierarchical, and the majority
of employees worked remotely. Until
recently, employees had named their
own compensation, determined their
own priorities, and come to decisions
by consensus, including some related to
interior design. As my host gave me
a tour through the office, I noted jug-
gling balls on a desk cluster, a children’s
play area, and a barefoot employee play-
ing video games. People shook cocktails
at the company bar. There was an in-
door picnic area with Adirondack chairs
and plastic grass, an orange shipping
container—a visual pun on “shipping
code”—with a gaming room inside, and
a row of so-called coder caves: dark,
cushioned booths designed for program-
mers who worked best under the con-
ditions of sensory deprivation.
The job was a customer-support role,
but the title listed in the offer letter was,
in homage to the company mascot, Sup-
portocat. I set that humiliation aside. My
co-workers at the analytics startup had
made fun of me for considering a “life-
style job”––it entailed a ten-thousand-dol-
lar pay cut––but I liked the company’s
utopianism. The open-source startup
hosted the largest collection of source
code in the world, including a public Web
site with millions of open-source soft-
ware projects. Excitable tech journalists
sometimes referred to it as the Library
of Alexandria, but for code. It was six
years old, with two hundred employees
and no serious competitors. The social
network everyone hated and the United
States government both used its tools.
For years, it had seemed that the com-
pany could do no wrong, but in the spring
of 2014 the first woman on the engineer-
ing team—a developer and designer, a
woman of color, and an advocate for di-
versity in tech—had come forward with
a spate of grievances. The startup, she
claimed, was a boys’ club. Colleagues
condescended to her, reverted and erased
her code, and created a hostile work en-
vironment. She described a group of male
employees watching female employees
hula-hoop to music in the office, leering
as if they were at a strip club. The de-
veloper’s story was picked up by the media
and went viral. The company conducted
an investigation. An implicated founder
stepped down; another moved to France.
For the first time, tech companies
were beginning to release internal di-
versity data. The numbers were bleak.
The people building the world’s new
digital infrastructure looked nothing like
the people using it. There was an ongo-
ing fight about the “pipeline problem”––
the belief, apparently divorced from
conversations about power or systemic
racism, that there simply weren’t enough
women and underrepresented minori-
ties in STEM fields to fill open roles. The
situation at the open-source startup
wasn’t the first instance of sexism and
racism in the tech industry, but it was
among the first to receive national at-
tention. It made me wary, but I won-
dered if there might be some benefit to
joining an organization forced to con-
front discrimination head on. Call it
self-delusion or naïveté; I considered
these calculations strategic.D
uring my first month in the job,
there was a lot of chatter in the
office about a group of Internet trolls
who had mounted a harassment campaign
against women in gaming. The trolls had
flooded social networks, spouting racist,
misogynistic, and reactionary rhetoric.
They had been banned from nearly every
platform, and had responded by citingthe First Amendment and crying cen-
sorship. On our platform, they thrived.
The trolls maintained a repository
of resources and data on women they
were targeting—photos, addresses, per-
sonal information. The trolls’ identities,
meanwhile, were impossible to trace.
My co-workers debated how seriously
to take the campaign. A popular narra-
tive about trolls was that they were just
a bunch of lonely men in their parents’
basements, but this looked like a coör-
dinated effort. The repository included
e-mail templates and phone-call scripts.
It was, my teammates agreed, unusual
to see them so organized.I
n October, I flew to Phoenix for an
annual conference of women in com-
puting, established in honor of a female
engineer who had helped develop mili-
tary technologies during the Second
World War. I was not really a woman in
computing—more a woman around com-
puting; a woman with a computer—but
I was curious, and the open-source startup
was a sponsor. The company put em-
ployees up in a boutique hotel with a
pool and a Mexican restaurant.
On the first night, my co-workers,
having flown in from Portland, Toronto,
Boulder, and Chicago, gathered over
margaritas and bowls of guacamole.
Many hadn’t seen one another since the
startup’s gender-discrimination crisis. I
hovered on the periphery, hoping that
the engineers would adopt me. Some of
them had unnaturally colored hair and
punk-rock piercings, signalling indus-
try seniority as much as subcultural affili-
ation. I had no idea what it would be
like to be a woman in tech whose skill
set was respected. I was disappointed to
learn that it wasn’t dissimilar from being
a woman in tech whose skill set wasn’t.
For the most part, the other women
at the open-source startup were glad
that the years-long party seemed to
be winding down. Leadership was
scrambling to tidy up after the discrim-
ination scandal: installing a human-
resources department; disabling the
prompt “/metronome,” which dropped
an animated gif of a pendulous cock
into the all-company chat room; roll-
ing up the “In Meritocracy We
Trust” flags. In retrospect, the adher-
ence to meritocracy should have been
suspect at a prominent international