Jenn Schiffer
Jenn is a community engineer at Fog Creek Software, where she works on Glitch, a community for building apps. She is a pixel artist and tech satirist.
We met at the Fog Creek office, where we chatted about social problems in the developer community, online harassment of women, and Peter Thiel's fascination with the blood of the young.
JACKIE
So we've been talking about Glitch and how it's helping people to learn to build apps and making it easier to deploy them. I was thinking about technology and how it's getting increasingly complex and more abstracted. I think you've talked a little bit about this, but there's this mentality that's a bad thing and making technology more accessible is a bad thing and you're not legit unless you're writing C or working on compilers.
JENN
“ I think that when we struggle with learning and we get to the point where we’re an expert—close to that point—we forget what it was like when we first started.”
Yeah, not a “real developer.” I mean, I feel like everyone in the tech community is always on the offense about if they're doing the right thing. Everyone will always talk about how they have imposter syndrome but then in the same breath they're saying, "If you're not using this tool the way I am, you're not doing it the right way." It's a very interesting and frustrating and exhausting thing to witness. So I—and those on the team at Glitch—we want to create a space where people can experiment but also build real web applications.
I've been having a lot of conversations online with people about, "What are you struggling with learning?" And I'm finding that I'm getting responses from beginners but also expert developers who built the libraries that everyone's fighting over. And it's really interesting to see. There are the engineers who built things like React and Ember, and they say, like, "Oh, React's cool in this way, Ember's cool in this way," and then you have the beginners who are like, "I don't know which one to use." Then there are the people who are in between who aren't necessarily beginners but they're not the experts, and they're the ones that are like, "Use this because this sucks," a lot. And it's a sociological problem that I can't solve; I'm just a witness to it. Like, who hurt you? Why are you like that?
And I think that when we struggle with learning and we get to the point where we're an expert—close to that point—we forget what it was like when we first started.
JACKIE
It's really hard to retain!
JENN
Yeah, it happens so fast! And we pull the ladder up behind us, and that makes us jerks, I guess. It's hard to combat that, especially when you want to fit in—we all actually just want to fit in with each other in some sort of way but also be unique at the same time. So that's another stressful component of adulthood that I personally have noticed.
So how do we be seen as good at our job while also doing some emotional labor in order to make sure that the people who look up to us or could look up to us have an easier path than we did? I saw this a lot when I was in university, where my professors, especially the women professors, were very tough on me. And I saw that they were trying to groom me to have a thicker skin and stuff, and in retrospect it's like, "Oh, I appreciate that you were that tough on me because things were tough for you, but wouldn't it be great to break that cycle? And how do we do that?"
“How do we be seen as good at our job while also doing some emotional labor in order to make sure that the people who look up to us or could look up to us have an easier path than we did?”
So I try to go into this role that I'm in now with an open mind and a focus on being more receptive toward the beginners or the people who could potentially be in the industry and not so much on the experts. And in doing that, I do give up a part of myself—one, people not knowing that I'm good at engineering. I do a lot of more social things now. I still write code, but "Community Engineer" is my title. And so people then—I get people who now think that, "Oh, you're not an engineer anymore." And it's like—one, that's an incorrect observation. Two, why are you making that observation? Like, what is your goal, to put yourself ahead? You know what I mean? It's just a really interesting—and again, frustrating—thing to witness.
But that is just one of the many social problems in the web development community as a whole. Besides the whole cult of personality, where you have those of us with tons of followers on Twitter and are seen as famous—which, ugh, gross whenever I think of that—so then there's this expectation that you have to hold, of being good at everything. And then when you're a woman, you also have to be even better. The men that have the following that I do not have nearly as many issues with harassment, of course. And they're surprised to hear about it.
So, for example, my DMs are open on Twitter. And I do that because I organize a couple of meetups and I want to promote people who want to speak, and maybe some of them have never spoken before, and I'll tell them, "Oh, if you want to speak, DM your ideas and we'll work it out." And I don't follow everybody, so I keep my DMs open so that they can contact me there. And it's easier for me to get to and have a conversation through DM than a whole bunch of—like, emails.
And so because of that, I will get random people I don't know or I haven't met who will DM me. They'll be argumentative with me. I've received dick pics. I feel like there are accounts on Twitter that have—I don't know if they have bots or scripts or something like that, but they're not people in tech. Well, sometimes they're people in tech. But I feel like they just try to send as many DMs to women as possible, and they get through to mine because my DMs are open.
And so I explained to a friend of mine who's an engineer at Mozilla, and he was like, "Oh, my DMs are open, and I have these great conversations." And I was like, "How many dick pics have you received?" And he was like, "Wait, whaaat?" And I was like, "Oh, I was just curious if this is just a thing that happens to women, because I think it's bots that do it, and I get them every other week." And he's just like, "No. Jesus, I would close my DMs." And I was like, "Yeah, I would love to not have to deal with that, but then I close off communication to these other people, and if I close off communication, that's seen as cold." And so it's navigating these social problems as a woman—a lot more difficult, I would imagine, than it is for my male counterparts.
JACKIE
Do you think that's—I mean, obviously this is partly a societal problem and software can't fix that completely—but I feel like it's also potentially a structural design issue with Twitter, for instance? It's much easier to get into weirdly combative situations with total strangers than it is on basically any other platform.
JENN
Yeah, yeah. I do think it's a design issue of tech. In the tech industry, you have these guys in power who wax poetic about how tech is going to save everybody, but then when they fail, they're like, "Oh, well, you don't care about—" Like, with Uber, when that whole scandal was going on. People were pointing out, "Oh, people on Wall Street are sexist, and no one gets on them." And I was like, "That's because we don't expect Wall Street to give a shit about people. That's their history. We're not going to change them."
But tech, they go on stage and they talk about how we're going to save the world. And it's like, "Well, you want to save the world, we have higher expectations of you."
And it's interesting with Twitter—I love Twitter. I mean, I wouldn't be where I am without Twitter, just the people that I know, the interactions I have, all the opportunities I've gained that I never would have been able to have just being a woman going to meetups and stuff like that, just wouldn't be a thing. And then of course I have to deal with a lot of that bullshit to get to it, but for me, in the end, it’s worth it.
I’m seeing a lot of people now who are using Mastodon, the decentralized thing, and I’m on an instance that my friend who’s an engineer at Microsoft made. But everyone’s just like, “Everyone, join Mastodon! Twitter’s full of Nazis. Mastodon is new and great.” And I’m thinking, I’m kind of skeptical, because Mastodon is not going to be great just because it’s a clean slate—you know what I mean? I went on, and I saw an avatar of Pepe. Like, I thought there were no Nazis on here! You know what I mean?
Kind of like when Facebook was shutting down accounts of trans women who were not using their dead names. Ello came out, and everyone was like, “Ello is better than Facebook! They won’t delete your names.” Well, Ello’s a completely different kind of platform. It’s made by just another company. It’s new. Who’s to say—just because Ello’s like, “Oh, we’re not going to put ads on our site”—who’s to say that they’re not going to change their—you know.
There’s just a lot of… I’m just very surprised that people—even my age and younger—have these expectations that they hold on these tech companies, and then they’re so shocked when they’re let down. I’m like, “I guess I’m just super jaded.” I assume that everything I put online that is under the guise of a private site is going to be made public at some point. It’s going to be sold to somebody. It’s going to get hacked and stuff like that. And there’s not going to be really a way for me as an individual to hold those people accountable.
I don’t know. Every time I blame stuff on capitalism, I have to send my friend Potch a dollar. So not going to go into that point, but, you know, it’s definitely—it’s very interesting. Another thing that I think of is when I was working at the university, every fall, when the new students would come through, I’d see groups of them out smoking cigarettes, and I’m like, “When’s the year that, like, college kids are going to be hip to not smoking cigarettes?” But I just don’t see it happening, and so you just—the kids keep coming through and using the internet and they witness all of the news and scandals around sexism in tech and people being hacked and people selling stuff, but they just choose to be oblivious to that, and then there’s this sort of performative outrage whenever bad things happen, which then does fade. Performative outrage has an expiration date, and that’s why companies are able to get away with all these things.
JACKIE
It feels like even now—the United thing happened yesterday. Now people are like, “Wow, shift in narrative, man had whatever drug-related history!”
JENN
Yeah, like that! And Pepsi was last week, and so now everyone’s like, “Wow, Pepsi must be happy because of the United thing.” Yeah.
JACKIE
It just feels like a very weird—and I don’t know if it’s accurate or not because my perception of this is probably very skewed—but it just feels like the way that we experience events now is getting more and more condensed. And I don’t know what sort of implications that that has.
JENN
Yeah. And also, a couple people at lunch were like, “Oh, what’s the Pepsi thing?” So, you know, we’re all in this social bubble where I’m on Twitter all the time, and so I know about all these different things. But then I have all these friends who only use Facebook, and they’re like, “Oh, I know this thing,” and of course on Facebook the news is a lot more superficial. Some of this is like, “Oh, this celebrity was out and about,” and I’m like, “I don’t even know who that is! Twitter?” So it’s—besides navigating the social issues within the web development community, also dealing with current events and navigating how to handle that and the post-election thing. It’s just a lot of complicated things happening online.
And then I spoke at NYU a couple of weeks ago. There was a woman there who was an engineering student, and she was like, “I don’t use social media. How do I find meetups to go to?” I think she was interested in music theory and tech. And, you know, normally my advice for people is, “Oh, you could check social media or whatever,” but she was like, “No, I don’t do that.” You know what I mean? So you remember that there’s a whole other contingent of people out there that navigate society in a completely different way than I do, and all I can do is be like, “Don’t understand that world, so I can try to find somebody else, but my road to finding things is social media, and I don’t know how to do it otherwise.”
JACKIE
Do you experience—I mean, apart from, obviously, harassment and abuse and stuff—negative effects from social media just from social media operating as it should? For me, I feel like I love Twitter, but I feel like very often I will reach a sort of different state of mind or something using it, and it feels not good for me when I get too sucked in. You don’t have to feel that way!
JENN
When there are—whenever there are little pockets of drama, like within the JavaScript community or something like, or something really infuriating happens, I’ll be like, “What’s going on?” And I’ll be seeing the responses to it, and it sort of snowballs into, “Oh, this is a really big systemic problem that I can’t fix with a tweetstorm.” Or if it doesn’t involve me but it still angers me, I feel like, “I need to process this away from the screen and have conversations with my friends and people I know and not involve the internet in that.” It’s very hard to get lost in all of that content and discussion. One of my arguments against using just Mastodon and leaving Twitter is that I’ve been using Twitter for nine years. I’ve curated who I follow and what I’m looking at, and I know all those people aren’t going to just move over to Mastodon, so why would I leave my regular reading content? Because something else is apparently better. Which, from what I can tell, isn’t exactly true, so yeah.
JACKIE
Okay, so switching topics. Another thing I wanted to ask you about was—I watched your XOXO talk, and you made fun of Peter Thiel and the blood of the young or whatever—
JENN
Parabiosis?
JACKIE
Yeah! That seems to be not just Peter Thiel, you know? It seems to be a thing in tech for people to want to live longer and avoid the apocalypse—
JENN
Avoid eating regular food via Soylent. Yeah.
JACKIE
And I guess I’m curious about what your thoughts are on a broader level about that, what that says about tech and society and whatever.
JENN
So Soylent is the first thing that comes to mind. And I have friends who try it and some who are like, “I’m going to drink Soylent,” and I’m very skeptical of it. I’m very skeptical of most things that come out of tech culture.
I grew up very poor. I was homeless in the last year of—last half of my senior year of high school. And I’m doing great now. And I’m always trying to be aware of how I can use where I’m at now to help people who were in my position. So volunteering with young girls at underserved schools and our meetups—Brooklyn.js and all the other Manhattan.js meetups—we donate all the proceeds of sales after expenses to ScriptEd so we can provide computer science education to underserved schools.
So then I see other people that claim that they’re community leaders and stuff—or just—I don’t know, they don’t say they’re community leaders. Like, the guy who created Soylent’s not a community leader, but he definitely sees himself as somebody who’s innovating the human experience. And I feel like the human experience needs to be innovated for everybody and not just rich white men in tech.
So when I first about Soylent, I think I was in grad school—it was a long time ago. It was like, “Oh, it’s this superfood, it’s easy to access, blah blah blah.” I assumed, reading about it—maybe it was an essay he wrote or something like that—I assumed that it was supposed to be solving world hunger.
“I feel like the human experience needs to be innovated for everybody and not just rich white men in tech.”
JACKIE
I think especially initially they did frame it that way.
JENN
Yeah! I was like, “Am I crazy or was this the thing that was supposed to be solving world hunger?” But nobody poor is eating it, which means that nobody poor has access to it. It’s packaged in really nice bottles and I always see tech people experimenting, trying it out, or the guy who founded it talking about solely eating that. So it’s like, “Well, if you’re such an innovator of the human experience, why aren’t you using that to help people who actually need that?” I don’t think that engineers need to be more productive. I don’t see it as a high-priority issue to me.
JACKIE
I mean, especially in terms of—it feels like a very sort of tech thing to say, “I don’t even have time to eat for half an hour a proper meal.” How much is that really gaining?
JENN
Right, yeah. And I mean, this also goes completely against the part of culture of tech that I am in where work-life balance is really important. It’s a slippery slope—I feel like if you’re like, “Oh, eating takes up too much time.” Well, then, how many steps from “Eating a normal meal is unproductive” to “Getting pregnant is too unproductive, and how do we prevent pregnancy from being an unproductive part of the workplace? Well, we could just get rid of anybody who has the ability to get pregnant…” which is what academia does.
So, you know what I mean? I see these things where people are trying to make engineers more productive, and it’s like, “You are basically creating a space to potentially block out marginalized people from being part of your world.”
JACKIE
Well, because then the most productive person is just the young white male with no attachments and no family and stuff.
JENN
Yeah, exactly. And by the time they get burned out, it’s too late for them to find a healthy relationship to move on. And then what are they going to do after that? So it’s a lot of—it’s just very selfish thinking.
And you know, the guy who made Soylent wrote this blog post about other things that he does in order to enhance his life as a very productive person, and one of them was that he doesn’t do laundry. He was like, “Oh, I save energy and water by not washing clothes. Instead, you can buy clothes really cheap in China!” And I was like, “Are you completely disconnected from the idea of sweatshops, of child labor?” It’s such walled-in thinking. And I’m like, “Does this guy not have friends who are outside of this bubble?” It’s incredible.
But then you see people online who idolize this kind of people. Elon Musk, right after he had joined Trump’s group, and he was tweeting, being an apologist for Trump’s Muslim ban or something like that—I just replied to his tweet, “You’re boring.” I got so many tweets from men all being like, “What have you done? What have you done? Blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “Didn’t join Trump’s administration, I didn’t cause a Muslim ban, I’m not apologizing for it.” But these men—it’s like… I just remember telling my CEO, “Do they think he’s going to sleep with them? What is their endgame here? Elon’s going to be like, ‘Oh, this guy defended me against this rando woman—I’m going to hire him and give him a high salary, endless supply of Soylent, young people’s blood.’”
And so the parabiosis thing. My point was in that talk—I mean, it’s funny. The idea of this evil man... of course you’re doing that.
JACKIE
Like a cartoon villain.
JENN
Right! I mean, parabiosis is a thing that dictators all over the world do, and it’s—you know, it’s cool to invest in science and stuff like that, but again, is it high priority? And to Peter Thiel, his living forever is a high priority to him. And then people try to be like, “Well, this could be great for everybody,” but it’s like, “We can’t all live forever.” It’s just a very interesting thing where nobody thinks about the greater picture. It’s just kind of this idol who has this idea. And everyone thinks Peter Thiel is the guy who’s going to make parabiosis happen. And it’s like, “It’s already happening. You’re in a bubble. Wake up.” It’s just another frustrating thing. How can we use the research that goes into parabiosis to help people that are not only rich and cohabitating in Silicon Valley and New Zealand and purely evil or whatever? What’s that’s going to be useful for, you know? I don’t know.
So yeah—that’s just another—I always think, “Am I the one that’s bananas or…?” It’s just insane. But yeah, the Soylent thing, I always think of… I’m glad that you were saying that that’s how it was framed in the beginning because I’m just like, “If I am correct, this was supposed to actually change the world, but ‘the world,’ not the tech world.” Which people forget. Yeah, tech is pervasive everywhere, but thankfully the culture of tech is not nearly as pervasive in other places.
JACKIE
Why do you think tech culture—like what you said about Elon Musk, especially, is maybe the best example—has this specific kind of hero worshippiness that doesn’t seem to happen as often in other industries?
JENN
“How do we teach these people empathy? They’re not going to learn it from people who make less money than them because, again, that’s what’s driving all of that.”
Well, I mean, social media is a big part of that. Elon Musk is someone who tweets. He is someone who is part of really cool futuristic things—I had always been really interested in space travel, and he’s making it happen. He’s good-looking, ish. So he doesn’t really fit the whole nerd thing, although if you look at the old PayPal photos of him and Peter Thiel… huge fucking nerds. But now he’s rich and he’s got some nice suits and stuff like that, so he just seems like a charismatic, smart, doing cool shit. Space travel is cool. Whatever Peter Thiel’s doing—oh, he’s a VC. That’s not cool to me. But Elon Musk is doing cool stuff. People latch on. They’re like, “Okay. It’s okay for him to be your problematic fave.” You know what I mean? Because he’s doing cool stuff.
And I thought he was cool, too. And then the whole him joining the Trump administration thing happening, it was just like, “Elon, what the fuck are you doing?” And then him being apologetic for Trump. It was like, “Okay, yeah, you’re just another rich white guy who, like, you know.” I, too, fall victim to that.
But I also—when you’re working in tech, you try to look for someone to look up to. There’s not much representation for women or people of color. I mean, whenever people talk about women CEOs, they talk about Marissa Mayer, and she’s fucking dropping the ball. And it’s like, “Oh my god, we’re rooting for you, but…” And people are like, “Oh, are you worried that Marissa Mayer failing at Yahoo will make it harder for women to be CEOs?” It’s already hard for women to be CEOs. Do you find that Marissa not being good at her job is making it hard for you to accept women can be CEOs? Like, flip the switch here, you know what I mean?
Then you have women who are in power, like Sheryl Sandberg, and they write these books like Lean Inabout stuff that’s completely unrealistic to other people, and I’m like—you know, when I was growing up, my dad always—I don’t talk to my father—but he always had this guilt that we grew up without money and we were hungry at times and I was on my own at a young age, and he regrets that he put me through that or whatever. And I’m kind of like, I think I feel more bad for the people who grew up rich who are in that little bubble because they don’t understand the whole experience, and there’s going to be a point when I think something gives, and the rich are going to be the first ones eaten, you know what I mean? And they’re going to wonder what’s going on. I hope that happens in my lifetime, but, I mean, I don’t know.
It’s just, okay, my experience means that I have empathy. How do we teach these people empathy? They’re not going to learn it from people who make less money than them because, again, that’s what’s driving all of that. But I just remember seeing that picture of all the—Larry Page representing Google at the Trump tech summit thing. I remember thinking, “Aw, Larry, you were supposed to be the cool one.” And seeing him there, Jeff Bezos was there, Sheryl Sandberg was there. I was like, “You’re all a bunch of fucking dirtbags. So complacent. You have all this money to do all this stuff. Be cool. Please, someone be cool.” But I guess you can’t be cool and be in power in 2017.
JACKIE
That’s a little depressing.
JENN
I know! Yeah, yeah. It’s a bummer. But I don’t see anarchy happening anytime soon, you know. You see little pockets of it when big protests come out and stuff like that, but, you know.
JACKIE
It feels like there is this growing tension. One thing that’s come up in some of the interviews I’ve been doing is Otto and displacing truck drivers and how that’s the most common job in so many states and at the same time, on the other hand, you have people who are prepping for the apocalypse. It feels like this kind of weird stage of society.
JENN
Yeah, yeah, yeah. People joke about Y2K, but there are definitely people who are prepping at a way bigger level than Y2K preppers were. The automation of jobs is always an interesting thing. Being an engineer—I used to do dev ops, and my job was to automate tasks that I myself was doing. And the whole joke was, “Don’t automate yourself out of a job!” But someone’s got to do the automation, and so I’m automating my own things.
So when you see Uber and Google coming through and talking about self-driving cars, and maybe we can do self-driving trucks, it’s like, “You’re not automating your own work. You’re automating other people’s jobs, and that’s an ethical issue.” But no one really cares about ethics. Because of capitalism—I’ll owe two dollars—well, no one else is caring about ethics, so in order for us to be able to compete, we have to have the same moral standards, or lack thereof, as the rest of them.
You know, with the whole United flight controversy, there’s not much competition within airlines, in the US, at least. I mean, United, American Airlines, they’re all sort of owned by the same company. And so no airline is going to be like, “Yeah, forget United, come fly with us.” There might be international airlines that do that, but not domestic. They sort of work well together instead of competing against each other because there’s enough demand for flying to deal with that, so nothing’s really going to happen with this United thing. I mean, that poor guy is bleeding on a video, and everyone’s watching it, and people are investigating his life, as if a drug felony or whatever is relevant to his refusing to leave a seat that he paid for, you know? But just the American way of thinking is, “Well, what did he do wrong, ever, in his past?”
And I think that’s why sexism thrives in the tech industry, because if you were going to report something, you have to make sure that you have a completely flawless background. You have to be white, you have to be preferably blond, good-looking because you don’t want someone to be like, “Oh, nobody would have ever raped you because you’re ugly.” Thin. You had to have probably never have had sex. But a certain age where it’s still okay to be a virgin, so not married yet or whatever. And then you have to maybe be in a relationship with a guy where he hasn’t done anything wrong and he’s also the boy next door. And you have to have everything perfectly documented—it’s like this impossible scenario to be in.
So Susan Fowler, who reported the sexism she experienced at Uber—she sort of, kind of fit that mold, where it was flawless. She wrote the whole blog post; she has a new job at a place where they have a better culture (I think she ended up at Stripe); her pinned tweet is a photo of her and her new husband; she’s a cute blonde; she did—I think she was a security engineer—so she did good, important, interesting work at Uber. So it was really kind of an ironclad, rock-hard stance that nobody could really fight. And that must have been so fucking frustrating to Uber. Because then she had tweeted that—Uber had mentioned Arianna Huffington and Eric Holder were going to do an internal investigation even though they were already on the Uber board, so it’s not a real investigation—and she found out that they had a separate lawyer, basically investigating her. And so she was tweeting, “If people are asking you for information about me, they’re trying to start their smear campaign. By the way, this is my new lawyer that I just hired.” And she had hired a law firm. And then things sort of fizzled out.
And that was just a really unique position because then it makes you think—she went through a lot of bullshit, but it’s not a unique situation. I’m sure many women at Uber went through that, but they didn’t fit the perfect mold of the white woman who’s eloquent and blogging and all my blogs like that are lowercase and misspelled, you know—people will focus on that! It’s really frustrating not being able to just do your job without worrying about what comes up in the past, you know. It makes me think if I were ever in a situation where I had to report something or I was—I mean, I would never be dragged off a plane, I’m a white woman—but if something of a similar sense were to happen, what would be dragged out about me? You know what I mean? God, they would look at my Twitter, for a start.
I don’t know, it’s just very—it’s something that I’m always thinking about, “What will someone misinterpret or what would happen if something were to happen to me? If someone finds my address, what’s my backup plan?” I always tell women who are trying to be more visible online, have a backup plan, in case things happen, and one woman was like, “It’s just exhausting to think about.” I was like, “It is exhausting. We are exhausted.” But we still have to be good at our day job and even better at our day job or else, you know, there’s just a lot more scrutiny on us. And it’s also depressing to talk about because I don’t know how to solve it. So the best thing that I can do is, “Okay, I’m in a position at a good company that’s well known. We’re going to do product. Let’s focus on trying to make the world a better place with the product.” Which, you know, sounds completely un-punk rock and everything that I used to stand for, but at the end of the day, I choose to not work at startups. Nothing that’s funded by Peter Thiel, you know what I mean? So I avoid startups entirely.
“I’m always thinking about, “What will someone misinterpret or what would happen if something were to happen to me? If someone finds my address, what’s my backup plan?””
I have to work for people who have the same values as me and I trust will not change, and I know Anil definitely follows that, and I’ve known him for years, and I trust him. And I also feel like I have to have an equal voice on my team as other people—I’m the only woman on my team right now. And that hasn’t been a problem yet; it’s only been two months. But we’re a small company, so we’re not completely hiring people all the time, but it would be nice in the future to have more women on the team. And that’s something that the rest of the team recognizes as well. There’s no reason for that not to be the case. So far, so good.
And I’m in a position where I feel like if I hit a snag and I felt wronged in any sort of way, I could go somewhere else. And people say to me, “Oh, you could work wherever you wanted.” And I’m like, “That’s not true. But if it were true, there’s not many places I would want to work at because there’s a lot of shit out there.” But from the perspective of a white guy, it’s all these opportunities, you know what I mean?
We were talking at lunch about the Pepsi commercial. People were complaining like, “Yeah, the commercial sucked,” and they were drinking Pepsi. And I’m just like—we have Coke—and I’m just drinking my Coke like, “Oh, yeah, sure, yeah.”
I had this frustrating meeting yesterday with a bunch of New York City JavaScript meetup organizers I had never met. And they were saying, “Oh, your meetups are great! How do we collaborate?” But I had mentioned how one of the meetups didn’t have a code of conduct, and I was like, “You need to have something in place whenever,” and he was like, “Oh, they’re so negative, though.” And I’m like, “You know what else is negative? Being harassed at a tech meetup.” It was just a really frustrating meeting where I felt like I had to explain myself, and it’s like, “You brought me here to give you advice. I’m giving you advice, and you’re fighting me on it, and I have the experience, and you don’t. So what is the point here? Was the point just to bring a few women”—because a few of my collaborators are women—“a few women in here to make you all feel better about yourselves? Because it’s not going to happen.” It was just a huge waste of my Monday, and so I’ve just been in this mood and then during lunch, I was like, “Ugh.” And then Anil came and was like, “What’s up?” And I’m like, “Ugh! Just had the full dose of the white male experience,” which everyone has who’s not a white male. Ugh, the fucking code of conduct discussion all the time. And then I went on that guy’s meetup site, and there’s a code of conduct on there—he doesn’t—ugh, God. What a world.
JACKIE
What a world, yeah.
JENN
Unreal, unreal.
JACKIE
It’s interesting, that specific dynamic, where everyone now wants to appear #woke or whatever, but they’re not willing to actually put in the effort. And I feel like the backlash from that is often worse than if you hadn’t tried at all.
JENN
Yeah. It reminds me of when older white people used to say “bling bling” to sound cool, and you’re just like… And this is before the greater discussion of cultural appropriation in social media had come about, and you just think of people who just want to fit in. And it’s easier for them to pick one little thing to be like, “Oh, yeah, I know what that is.” And again, it’s like this performative outrage around the Pepsi commercial, the United flight. It all has an expiration date until the next scandal, and we’re in a world right now where there’s a new scandal every week, and so everyone comes across as way more woke than they actually are. And all I can do is just sit there and drink my Coke Zero, until they do something, which wouldn’t surprise me but would surprise other people. I’ll send another dollar to my friend because—
JACKIE
How much money do you owe your friend?
JENN
It’s just ironic—he donates it all. So I’ve been doing a lot more speaking over the past couple of weeks, and so I’ll send him twenty dollars, and he just donates it back to ScriptEd. It’s just this ridiculous thing. It’s the only way to explain all this crazy stuff that’s going on! Anyway, so I judged the HackNY hackathon over the weekend—they’re this nonprofit and they have a fellowship program for developers and stuff.
JACKIE
Yeah, Chris Wiggins.
JENN
Yeah! And so that was cool. They have a new category that was “Best Social Good Hack.” I have all my notes right here. “Use your tech skills for good. Build something that has a positive social impact, be it a visualization that helps educate on an issue or an app that helps solve a problem.” And we got this list of all these apps—there were, like, forty that presented. This was a list of people that competed, and they picked their desired prizes. And I don’t know if it’s just because they wanted—you know—all their chances to get a prize, but there were just some of them that put themselves down for “Best Social Good Hack,” and it was, like, an alarm clock. The alarm clock didn’t even work. It’s just like, well.
I’m going to talk to Chris about this, but I think there needs to be a better discussion around what social good so it’s not just seen as another label to pander to people about. Because that was definitely what I was witnessing happening at the hackathon. There were some good social good causes, and those were the ones that I tried to promote to place and stuff. But I think, if anything, it’s really easy to—I mean, for me, it’s easy, and I feel like, if it’s easy for me, it’s easy for a lot of people—thinking, “Okay, these are the skills I have. These could be used for good in some way. The hard part is organizing it.”
So with the hackathon, if they have more of a discussion around what it means to be a socially good application developer, they could have some really great things come out of it. I think second place went to—“Period Piece” was the name of it—a man and woman, I forgot what university they were from. They made an app that—I forgot the percentage of homeless people who have smartphones in New York. But it’s a pretty high percentage. So they made an app that would detect your location, and if you’re a woman (or man—whoever, since men also have their periods, and this was period-focused), it would show you a location where there was access to free feminine hygiene products. And it would show you if the shelter had any left because that data is available, thanks to New York City, and where to call if you need to find a place nearby. And also an icon on the app was to donate if you’re not someone in that need but you can donate money toward that cause. So that was a cool thing. And there was someone who was like, “Oh, I feel like that’s been done before,” but it’s a hackathon. Geez.
JACKIE
Yeah, what hasn’t been done? Alarm clocks haven’t been done before?
JENN
Yeah, nothing here is new and innovative, you know what I mean? But I feel like all the apps that people have made could have been used or written in a way to be social good. They’re basically CRUD apps. So I think there just needs to be bigger education and organization around what the needs of people outside of our tech bubble are. Maybe those engineers thought that an alarm clock was a social good thing, but I think they’re wrong, so it’s like, how do we better educate them to what social good is?
JACKIE
Maybe one last question, then. In terms of—what do you think are some ways that tech as an industry or individuals in tech, however you want to interpret it, can do more social good? I think there are a couple schools of thought around, “I’m going to be an engineer at Uber, but maybe I’ll volunteer over the weekends.” Or maybe you should be having a full-time job that aligns more with your values or whatever.
JENN
I recognize that there’s a lot of privilege in being able to move around and change jobs and stuff. I had a lot of really good friends who used to work at Mozilla, and they worked at Mozilla around the time that Brendan Eich—the then-CEO—came out that he had donated money to Prop 8, and people were like, “Why don’t you leave your job? Why don’t you quit your job because of this?” Without being like, “Oh, this is a complicated situation, maybe we don’t have the whole story or maybe I can’t just quit my job because I have responsibilities or a family or stuff like that.” So I never fault people for that.
I mean, if I have friends who are like, “Oh, I’m interviewing at Uber,” I’d be like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I do that for a lot of companies, though. I just say, “Why would you go there when you could go here?” And I help people try to find positions elsewhere. But then again, leases are complicated and all that kind of stuff like that.
I think that what you do in your off time is really important. If you’re working at Uber, you’re probably going to make some good money. So put some of that good money into a cause that needs that money more than you do. Volunteering time. Mentoring hackathons. There are people there that could mentor these folks and teach them what social good is. I wasn’t able to go to the hackathon except for the judging, and now I’m like, “Okay, I should have more of a presence, so I’m going to try to be a—forgot what they call them—at the hackathon they had people from Twilio to help teach how to use their API. I would think Glitch should have a presence there, at least give talks about what social good actually is. So I’m going to try to do that and maybe get some folks from my team to try that. Giving talks about meetups about how you feel about things.
“If you’re going to work at a company that is morally questionable, you have to own that. You have to own your situation, and you have to say how you feel. And if you don’t feel comfortable using your own voice in that company, then why are you working there?”
But also more importantly, if you’re going to work at a company that is morally questionable, you have to own that. You have to own your situation, and you have to say how you feel. And if you don’t feel comfortable using your own voice in that company, then why are you working there? And have conversations with people that aren’t management and can’t get to your management.
And maybe you can get help to find a place for you to work. Because again, it’s all in who you know. I always tell new developers, “Go to all these meetups! It might be intense talking to all these people, but all of us have the opportunities that we have because of social media and going to meetups and all of that. So if you’re in a job that you are in because you need the money and you don’t know what else to do but you don’t have a voice and you’re against what they’re about—well, then, you need to try to do something to get out of there, and conversations are the first thing. If anything, having conversations about moral quandaries in your company allows you to articulate to the company why things are bad, and that’s also useful. Because then people are like, “Why did Susan even work at Uber if that thing happened in the first place?” And I’m like, “Oh, maybe this thing happens at a lot of companies.”
JACKIE
It’s like, “Why do you work in tech?”
JENN
And then it’s like, “This doesn’t just happen in tech.” But again, tech is more pervasive and has a higher standard that the leaders have given themselves, so it’s time to hold those people accountable. How depressing would it be if tech became the next Wall Street where people were like, “Oh, yeah, it just sucks,” you know what I mean? I choose not to work—I mean, we’re literally by Wall Street—but I choose not to work at a financial company because that’s not the culture I want. And so I really like tech. I like the problems that come with the stuff I’m doing, so I’m trying to work my hardest in order to make sure that people—especially women younger than me—don’t come in thinking, “I’m not going to tech because that’s, like, you might as well work at Wall Street.”
