I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures. What could we have done as an industry to improve the author's experience? Maybe just having more female founders around in general (by removing any barriers) would make some of these circumstances more commonplace.
Many times in the article she perceive male founders as stoic machines that regardless of health or mental state would go to work and operate as if nothing is wrong, and then goes to copy that. That is a stereotype that is hurting both men and women, and removing that would resolve a lot of the hardship.
Postmortems often happen because someone ignored a pain point prior to the failure, rather than taking stock and doing some preventative work.
The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture. I was going to say 'tech people' but it's clear that there are people who don't like this pattern either. They tend to self-identify (sometimes privately) when I buck the trend and do something sane instead.
> The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture.
This goes way beyond tech. It is permeating the business world in general and society at large as well. "How are you? Fine!" -> I'm stable and we can do business.
VS: "How are you? Well, to be honest I'm having a lousy day, I've been ill for the last three weeks and three of my customers have left." -> This customer moves somewhere else as well. Besides the fact that most people really aren't all that interested in how you feel, they simply exchange these words as some kind of ritual formula.
People are pretending things are better than they are all the time because society sees anything less as weakness and weakness will result in things getting even worse for the person displaying that weakness. We are continuously conditioning each other to pretend that things are better than they really are.
To be honest, I hate that. It is indeed women who do this more, but not exclusively.
"Hi raxxorrax! How are you? Had a good morning? Want some cookies?" - Completely normal within my circle of friends as an honest question, but I don't like colleagues asking me constantly. You get nothing done if you always start small talk. The people asking you this are mostly not interested in an answer anyway. That is just the reality of it.
And then you do that with people that you might not even like. There is much value in some distance in a business setting. The most abusive work relations are probably prevalent if you get too close to every other employee.
One problem is that there isn't a social script for saying "I have been having a low-key mental health crisis for the past 18 months" in a way that people don't interpret as a request for help.
And also, it's none of the other person's business. Why should they care about you, in particular? They're just some random person looking for a solution to their problem. They're not your fucking therapist. That's what friends are for.
If you don't like ripping yourself to pieces, get out of the rat race after 3 years working as a programmer and live on cheap land away from cities (if you're in the US), growing your own vegetables. It's a much better life.
"Shooting the messenger" may looks like it hurts the other guy more but I've seen it screw up entire reporting hierarchies. By the time things go off the rails nobody higher than a level 1 manager has any damn clue what really happened, although they think they do based on the misinformation they've been fed.
Honestly though, I feel like some of the higher-up men have serious psychopathic issues; if they do show empathy, it comes across as pretended, as a trained tactic to pursue their goals. I've worked with driven managers who didn't have this and in the high-pressure environment they operated in (mostly high pressure to sell and make money, it was in software dev consultancy) ended up overworked and lost 6-12 months of their professional life because of it, plus whatever long term issues they developed because of it.
Have people like Zucc, Bezos, or Trump ever taken an extended period of time off because of stress or giving too much of a shit? No, they just fuck off to their resorts, private islands and yachts, do some cocaine or whatever vice they have and shrug it off. And those are the public figures; behind them are the more shady characters that have a lot of money and power without the personality and fame. It's the investors that tell a good-willing CEO or founder that they need to sack people, to make the hard decisions, while they reap the rewards, earning ridiculous money without doing the work for it or having to deal with the emotional or moral consequences of their decisions / votes themselves.
TL;DR I think people who care cannot reach the 'heights' that the super-rich, super-successful do. I also believe a trait / condition of psychopathy is a lot more prevalent in men. I believe this is a big factor in the gender representation in the upper echelons.
> I feel like some of the higher-up men have serious psychopathic issues; if they do show empathy, it comes across as pretended, as a trained tactic to pursue their goals.
Some people need to deliberately practice social skills in order to successfully communicate what they really mean.
> Have people like Zucc, Bezos, or Trump ever taken an extended period of time off because of stress or giving too much of a shit? No, they just fuck off to their resorts, private islands and yachts, do some cocaine or whatever vice they have and shrug it off.
This seems like a statement that would require stronger evidence before I'd build any conclusions on top of it.
Pretending that physical and mental health problems does not exist is a problem. It is sad aspect of human life that we reward social status and monetary rewards to those who are successful at hiding it, and punish those that either refuse or fail.
It seems worth to ask if there is a better way. It also seems that in a time where we care about inclusivity and diversity we need to let go of the perception that only people with perfect health should be allowed to lead.
Could be, but I assume leadership roles are hard not for keeping up appearances but for the actual work involved in being a leader. That we see hiding emotions as a defining/filtering attribute seems something arbitrary that society decided was an attribute leaders should have.
You want to pick strong, resilient leaders/trade partners/partners/employees. If you had some magical way to order people based on actual strength/resilience/grit, most people would (rightly) pick those highest on that scale.
Unfortunately, the only thing we have to go on is apparent strength. So everyone learns to pretend, to whatever degree they think is necessary.
Those who actually are that strong/resilient (for example, psychopaths monofocused on profit and power who don't care about working 80+ hour weeks) don't have to pretend so much. People who are more human (a euphemism for 'weaker', because everyone's terrified of the idea of someone actually being better than them) have to pretend more.
But you see how the solution here can't just be to lower the bar of apparent strength- or even how it's not clear how you could possibly do that? Everyone still innately prefers to work with the more confident person, all else being equal! And for good reason! It's an okay heuristic!
Even if you socially decree that 'it's okay to be weaker sometimes :) #behuman', people will just nod along and then go and reveal their preferences by who they choose to associate with anyway. And are they wrong? Do we want to rig things up so we select for CEOs who publicly show their weakness? I encourage you to try!
For what it's worth as a counterexample, many people attribute Dr. Bonnie Henry's display of emotional honesty and vulnerability at a live press conference as a masterclass in communication, an excellent example of leadership, and as having played an important role in British Columbia's (so far) successful coronavirus response.
(Citations for the above are easy to find but I'm on mobile so I don't feel like digging up the links).
So if I want to push myself in pursuit of my dreams, I need to sandbag because working hard sets bad precedent for others?
Edit: why is this flagged? Is it not a valid point? If you claim that there is a problem in tech because men are stoic and work long hours even during times of personal hardship, you're effectively shaming these men for working too hard. This is something that needs to be discussed before you start setting policy.
Treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. Making time for your mental health is not a cultural priority, and that results in a high rate of burnout across the industry. I think I'd have made it a lot further in my career, and faster, if I'd avoided that in my 20s.
I think pursuing an idea or project with wreckless abandon can be a beautiful thing. The risk of getting injured in the attempt to push limits is the cost of doing business.
They can do that but then there are people like me, who need no weekend off, no vacations, can work more than 60 hours a week - I am ready to take all leadership
It has infact opposite effect on me, the more I work the more I am escaped from normal day to life problems and emotional setbacks (caused mostly by other people and being aware myself, I can't do anything but just to blame myself) I choose work as my escapism.
I'll be even worse and note that this is a story that is fundamentally about a woman achieving reproductive success - and it sounds pretty miserable. The male version of this story is something like how much easier it is to sleep with an attractive women because a CEO title is perceived as high status.
Most people shape their lives around having a family - the incentives here are not favourable for females seeking out these sort of positions. Men get a lot more out of being powerful than women - having power is nearly the end of the game for a man. For Tracy it sounds like it was the beginning of a process of disillusionment.
She's obviously robust enough that it didn't really matter to her, but somewhere along the bell curve of personalities that incentive gap will make a difference.
This so much! I had a girlfriend, now friend, which is terribly successful and attractive and she regrets it all saying maybe it would have been better to focus on a family early on. She still has a very good chance in doing so, but clearly thinks it would have been better to use her 20s doing that and didn't do it because of the pressure to be a career woman in her circles and educational experiences.
Yes! This is spot-on. This is a social construct and a good example why I think we should focus more on male gender roles in order to achieve better equality.
Males have strict roles, expectations and reward structures in society, just like we all do. Equality movements have expected men to step down without giving them an alternative way of achieving self-worth. They still have the same pressures applied, but are expected to ignore them.
I think we should abandon the traditional work roles which cater so obviously to traditional male power and status, and also find a way to liberate men, so that they aren't pushed to such extremes to achieve status.
Men aren't pushed to extremes to achieve status. High achievers push themselves to extremes, where extremes are directly defined as places where other people don't push as hard.
I know we shouldn't confuse is with ought, but men in particular are very competitive in their youth, and whatever you think you can do to replace the status game will itself become a status game. Cultural wars to redefine status games are especially susceptible to becoming the new status game, because there's so much at stake; completely redefining the meaning of success, and unbalancing all the previously successful people.
Traditional male power and status seems pretty baked-in. That's why it's traditional. You can try and repress it, but sovereignty is conserved: in the end, like 90% of young men all want sex, because those are the genetics, and they'll compete to be the ones to have it.
You can try and social-condition men to repress their drives, and you'll get a bunch of neurotic weirdos who lash out and/or commit vile acts in the darkness.
If the industry lacked vc's and businesses were forced by the market to be sustainable, a well run business wouldn't need to deal with sexist vc's. Instead a few guys show up, pour _oceans_ of cash on tall fit white dudes copying your idea, and now you're forced to compete with tall white dudes with oceans of cash they can waste undercutting you.
The bad person here is the social norms and expectations formed due to the field being male-dominated.
Author mostly forced herself to live by those norms, despite facing different challenges. i.e. no male founders have to worry about pumping breastmilk between meetings, so asking to do that feels awkward.
If she chose to embrace her differences, and break more social norms (like taking longer maternity leave), her life will be easier. However, there is also the risk that the company could have failed by a thousand cuts that are difficult to attribute, she wouldn't have known at the time.
"one of our own VC's caller her a "little girl" while doing a fireside chat with her at PlanGrid"
Bonus bad guys from the comments:
"...potential investors take female founders out for dinner, ostensibly to talk over the potential investment but in reality as an attempt to sleep with them. ..."
> I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures.
Unchecked tech monopolies artificially driving up the cost of capital for startups seems like a large contributing factor. For sure VCs shouldn’t be engaging in sexist or predatory behavior, but that’s not really the root issue, just one of the more salient and proximate manifestations of larger industry-specific and broader societal issues.
