Techies rethink ideals amid change
When he was in his early 20s, William Fitzgerald found himself sitting in the same room as the prime minister of Pakistan, while then-Google Chairman Eric Schmidt extolled the virtues of an open and accessible internet. It was just one of many extraordinary experiences he had while working on Google’s policy team in Asia.
“It was amazing,” Fitzgerald said, recalling hours spent with internet activists and journalists the region over during a time when Google was known for taking a stand against the Chinese government’s actions in cyberspace. “It was this wild job where my values 100% aligned with this corporation,” he said.
But as time wore on, Fitzgerald found that sense of alignment slowly slipping away and feeling increasingly conflicted about the direction of the company.
Eventually, the stress of the job and how he felt about it landed him in the hospital with an excruciating case of shingles and other health problems. He realized it was time to quit. Shortly afterward, he formed his own advocacy and communications firm, The Worker Agency, with a client list that includes the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents Google employees and contractors.
Fitzgerald’s story is not uncommon in the tech industry. Many current and former workers got their starts fueled by the optimism of tech’s power to improve peoples’ lives, before finding themselves disillusioned, or just unconvinced, by the changethe-world ethos that many companies, large and small, rely on to attract workers and funding.
For some, rising concerns about tech’s role in perpetuating environmental and social injustice have come to outweigh the prestige and padded paychecks associated with working in the
industry.
That’s to say nothing of the thousands of tech workers laid off this year and late last year across Silicon Valley. Those factors coupled with the current downturn have led some to leave the industry for good, and caused others to enter it just for the money, or with a more clear-eyed sense of what is possible.
Many that enter tech fall on a spectrum that stretches between a romantic idea of the industry and a desire for financial gain. Here are some Bay Area people, from cynics to problem-solvers, talking about why they’ve left tech, or stayed while trying to find that balance between income and idealism.
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While many early Silicon Valley tech ventures were rooted in the antiestablishment ethos of the 1960s and ’70s, “The ’90s are when Silicon Valley became Wall Street,” said tech historian and University of Washington Professor Margaret O’Mara, who added that the decade was also when generating huge wealth came to signify success as much as producing paradigm-shifting technology.
“It became not just, ‘I want to get wealthy,’ ” O’Mara said. It was “I want to be able to afford to buy a home.”
In that context, the decision to take a job in big tech was an easy one for a recently laid off Bay Area tech worker. Despite describing themselves as a “complete cynic” about tech’s promises of real change, they looked for work in the industry after reaching a breaking point during the earlier period of the pandemic.
“I had a baby at home and no day care, and we’re living in a one-bedroom apartment and honestly something broke,” said the laid off worker, whom The Chronicle agreed not to name because they are applying to other positions at their former company.
While their role at the company was ostensibly focused on greening the inner workings of a massive organization, they said the tripling of their previous salary was the only green they cared about when they took the role.
“I don’t believe in tech for good at all,” they said.
The former tech worker said the money they made was more than they felt they deserved, but was also the kind of six-figure salary that makes it possible to exist comfortably in the Bay Area, consistently ranked as one of, if not the most expensive regions in the country — as well as a land of professed idealism.
“It’s not cool in tech to be a ‘greed is good’ capitalist type,” said O’Mara. “Everyone wants to pretend that it doesn’t matter, but, on a very practical level, it matters.”
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For Wendy Liu, an overwhelming commitment to the idea of growth above all else caused her to leave tech altogether.
She and a small group took a run at a startup around 10 years ago, gorging themselves on tech business classics like Elon Musk’s biography that hammered home the idea that if they just worked hard enough, riches would ensue.
“I had to believe I wasn’t doing it for the money,” Liu said. “I knew on the subconscious level that it was important for me to believe that I would make a lot of money someday, but that I was motivated by something more pure,” working on engineering projects that she thought would solve real problems.
Liu started her career with an internship at Google in 2013 that turned into a job offer — a golden ticket into one of the industry’s most vaunted employers.
“Things felt more optimistic and there was less tech criticism then,” Liu said. “You could just live your life and be happy about your job and feel lucky you had the job and be proud to associate with your employer.”
But she turned down the job with Google to co-found a startup. She said the environment at Google wasn’t as stimulating as she had hoped, not living up to the “admittedly naive idea I had of Silicon Valley” that would allow her to tackle tough engineering challenges and feel like she was making a difference.
“Every week we’d have a totally different business idea,” Liu said of her startup, after they pivoted away from its initial idea of being a social media savvy version of a data broker. “Looking at it now, we had no idea what we were doing.”
In the end, Liu said the fledgling business folded, despite devoting years of her life to it and “wrecking” both her physical and mental health. “I had to hit rock bottom,” she said.
But publishing her first book “Abolish Silicon Valley” allowed her to write “a critique of the tech industry from a place that sort of aligns with my values,” and which advocates for decoupling the innovation machine from its capitalistic driveshaft and redirecting its energies toward the greater good.
“I could write about the industry to help me make amends with my disappointments with it,” Liu said.
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Those kinds of experiences still don’t deter every entrant into the tech world.
That includes Sarika Bajaj, who, after completing dual master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, teamed up with two colleagues to form a startup.
The company, Refiberd, is developing technology that uses the reflected light from lasers shined on different types of fabric to quickly and accurately determine the type and blend of the material. Their goal is to more efficiently divert unwanted threads to the right recyclers.
In some ways, it is a classic Silicon Valley origin story. The company’s official address is Bajaj’s parents’ house in Cupertino, the same city where Apple is headquartered, and not far from where other onetime startups like Hewlett Packard moved out of the garage and onto the world stage.
Their pitch has been powerful enough to raise more than $3 million from environmentally minded investors.
As far as money is concerned, Bajaj said, she didn’t get into the industry chasing after riches, but she wouldn’t mind it if her hard work paid off either.
“I would like for this company to make us rich. I think it potentially could,” she said. But that is a long way off, and for now she thinks in increments of one to three years, planning out for the near future to make sure she has enough to live comfortably and grow the business with her cofounders.
Yet, she said, solving an actual problem with their research is also valuable, even if they don’t strike it rich.
“I’ve been able to live a great life, to get an education and be secure about my finances. Why would I spend time doing something that I think is boring and doesn’t maximize the impact I could have?”
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There are other ways to have a positive effect, even in the world of big tech.
Disney “Diz” Petit worked for years at Postmates and was one of its early employees before the company’s 2020 acquisition by Uber, a purchase that allowed her to make a successful exit from the company and use the proceeds to get her startup going.
That job also saw her work on projects to deliver extra food from restaurants to nonprofits, and to feed needy people who didn’t have smartphones, which helped inspire the company she would go on to found along with a key engineer on one of the projects.
When Uber bought Postmates, she decided the new company’s culture wasn’t the right fit for her and she eventually started LiquiDonate, a San Francisco donation delivery startup that takes a fee from retailers for collecting their unwanted items and finding a home for them with nonprofits.
Now, she spends her days finding places for those extra items — like trucking loads of pea milk from the Ripple factory in Berkeley to nonprofits like East Bay Food Not Bombs.
“The idea is that we were able to match excess product with people who needed it,” Petit said, a knack she turned into the company she runs today with more than $2 million in venture funding.
She said she also gets huge interest anytime she posts a job online, pointing to an eagerness in the tech workforce to become part of what Petit called the “social impact space” in tech.
“It’s overwhelming every time we make a posting,” she said, adding she stopped taking applications for one job after 48 hours, when it quickly racked up more than 300 applications.
“The biggest thing I hear from other founders and also people I interview or work with at LiquiDonate is they want to do something that’s meaningful,” and that they want to feel good about, she said.
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That is, in some ways, the same conclusion that William Fitzgerald, the former Google worker, came to in founding The Worker Agency.
What started out as a rented desk in a co-working space on Market Street has since turned into a thriving operation with a handful of staff, and a growing client list of activist causes.
These days he finds himself sending out press alerts about tech workforce strikes, organizing pressure campaigns by gig workers, or helping to get the word out about the latest protest in front of a tech CEO’s mansion in San Francisco.
Asked if running his own shop gave him the same feeling of being aligned with his personal values as his early days at Google had, Fitzgerald said yes, but even more so. In many ways, he said, his communications work these days is similar to what he did at Google, albeit on the other side of the fence, and without reaping the same financial rewards that come with working at one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world.
“I’m working with research, helping with op-eds, doing press releases, pitching stories,” Fitzgerald said. But instead of dealing with levels of stress and internal conflict that began to affect his health, he said the last four years have been the best of his life to date.
“Through this job I’m able to use the skill set that I’ve developed over the last 15 years and use those skills to right some of the wrongs that are happening around us,” he said.
“It feels like it was a journey to get here,” Fitzgerald added. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”