Personal Memoirs of a Silicon Valley Tech Whore: Part 2
Introduction
The creator of the brilliant TV show The Wire, David Simon, is also the creator of another excellent, though lesser known, show called The Deuce. The Deuce explores the rise of the golden age of porn, and, more pertinently to our case, it depicts a veritable array of peacock-esque pimps - each unique and distinguishable by the way they dress as well as by the psychological techniques they imploy to keep their bitches in line.
We'll explore several pimp archetypes in this piece, and see how they manifest themselves in the tech industry.
depicted: pimps from The Deuce
The show also explores the phoenix-like rebirth of the prostitutes from the ashes of their whoring ways to their new lives as porn stars, now free of their obsolete pimps, Free Women making Big Money. Such rebirth is possible either when one encounters exceptional circumstance (the rise of the porn industry) or through deep self-introspection: realizing that we are, after all, Free Men (& Women) and that "there's no fate but what we make for ourselves".
But of course, not everyone gets to have a happy ending - some whores are just too irrevocably damaged to ever function in society again, and even given the chance, cannot see the point as to, like, why bother.
A Tale of a Jedi, a Guru and a Tyrant
I've met two remarkable pimps in the tech industry: the first one was the Jedi from Part 1. The second one I shall dub The Guru. The two have a lot in common: both oozed charisma, both were extremely good with people, and both had this infectious enthusiasm about them. You felt recharged after talking to them. But, much like photographs of beautiful landscapes which do not communicate the feeling of sheer vastness and immensity to the viewer as they are experienced by whoever had been there physically, so the above descriptions do not do justice with neither the Jedi nor the Guru. I think the best description of the type of effect and affect these kinds of individuals have on other people is what Hertzfeld wrote about Steve Jobs's Reality Distortion Field (RDF):
The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it … but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.
Steve Jobs, btw, is the leading contender for the title of GPOAT (Greatest Pimp of All Time). I guess that would make poor Wozniak the GBBOAT (Greatest Bottom Bitch of All Time), for he catapulted his pimp, S. Jobs, from a hippie sandal-wearing and fruit-eating obscurity to worldwide stardom.
The good thing about the RDF is that while you're along for the ride, everything's perfect - you're carried on this wave of pure enthusiasmus and everything clicks just right, and you feel like you have a purpose. The bad thing about the RDF is that the hangover's a bitch. The RDF might as well be treated as an illicit & addictive substance, it has that much of potentially destructive effect on people's lives.
While similar in many ways, the Guru and the Jedi were nonetheless fundamentally different in their nature. The Jedi manipulated people and circumstance to his advantage, granted, but he was never malicious per se. He never meant any harm to anyone: in the story from Part 1 I claimed he made me stay with the company for roughly a year and half longer than I would have stayed were he to do nothing, and I argued that he'd done so through underhanded tactics and the whole thing was exploitative on his part, but the fact is that he gave me exactly what I wanted - an interesting project to work on, a way for me to exercise my technical talents to their fullest. In arguments, he never forced me or others to do things we considered to be wrong, although he very much could do just that and save himself a lot of time and effort. There were heated debates, but no one was ever shut down or told to shut up and put up. He made considerable efforts to guide us, almost imperceptibly at times, to seeing things as he saw them (or as he wanted us to see them, I guess) - he wanted our full and willing cooperation. It was his genius: never forcing anything and yet (mostly) getting everything he wanted. There was undeniable underlying goodness to him, a certain purity of intention. Though, that comes with the minor caveat that he had some questionable practices: one, for example, was how he handled giving raises. The Jedi had the ingenious method of giving raises ahead of time, before you'd have the chance to ask him for one. That way he not only saved money for the company by giving a lower raise than you would probably ask for, but also made us feel very special and appreciated. Like strippers on a 10ft. poll, we were spreading our asses and shaking our tits while he was making it rain on us. At the time we were completely ignorant of the fact that perhaps, just maybe, if you, like, did the math, we weren't getting all that special of a treatment after all. No matter, it felt special.
Now, the Guru, on the other hand, was versed in an entirely different school of the dark arts of manipulation. Unlike the Jedi, whom I've characterized as mostly benevolent Zen master with high aptitude for diplomacy, the Guru had a much more baleful undertone to him.
Several years had gone by since I've left the company with the Jedi, during which I worked with wholly unremarkable people at wholly unremarkable companies, looking for a place to provide me with the opportunity to do Great Work. I thought my whoring days were behind me, but as it turned out, all I needed was the combinative incentive of just enough money and just the right pimp to have me back on my back, as it were. My soon-to-be new pimp, the Guru, had worked at a startup which had been recently acquired by a multi-national corporation, and so they were flush with money, and had great hopes for the future. They were hiring as fast as they could, and had a whole lineup of future products they hoped would corner a new and exciting market, a "market" which they pretty much willed into existence through the power of marketing buzzwords.
The company was headed by a gray bureaucrat, a non-technical FAANG graduate armored with a shining MBA diploma, the type of person that smiled professionally habitually, who had somewhat curious if not entirely bizarre visions of the future - he took the advice of "you should solve a problem you personally have" way too seriously, but also had enough political chops to convince a corporation to sponsor his foray into entrepreneurship. Almost admirable. I remember him distinctly because he refused to interview me, as the last formality required before they could present me with a contract, until I had "decided I wanted to join them". Is that the type of shit they teach you at MBA school?
Whatever, the pay was exceptional, and I wouldn't be working on the asinine products directly anyways - I'd be working on the cloud infrastructure and internal tooling. And frankly, I needed the money, I wanted to get on with my life, buy a house or maybe fuck off to the country, away from all of this bullshit. So like a stripper who's ostensibly stripping to pay for college, I signed up and put on my clear 7-inch heels, ready to rock the stage.
Turns out, a huge and utterly unjustified infusion of cash, combined with complete lack of standards, proved to be lethal. We were hiring people as fast as we could, to work on an entire lineup of products that we had no idea if anyone would even want (MVPs are for poor people), all while our business development people were running around South America, of all places, trying to close deals with highly questionable businesses, selling them promises we never intended to keep (what in the actual fuck). Eyebrow-raising business practices aside, the result of the rapid hiring process was a highly volatile and toxic mixture of incompetence, megalomania and undiagnosed mental illnesses. We had a sociopath for VP R&D who insisted on restructuring the organizational chart every three months for no discernible reason, quipping aphorisms along the lines of "don't worry, you'll get used to how things are in no time at all and won't even remember how they were used to be done" (t-t-thanks for the reassurance I guess, you fucking psycho). A Russian engineer who might as well been pulled straight from the glory days of the USSR, including the communist-party-issued buzzcut and the militaristic, borderline violent, menacing attitude who couldn't be reasoned with. A bunch of freshly promoted group leaders that reveled in arbitrary authority and had weekly if not daily managerial-penis measuring contents and territorial disputes. A schizo man-child who insisted on littering his station with toys and pop-heads, and would go nuts if you moved any of them. A religiously devout Jewish kippa-donning engineer who had anger management issues and would randomly lash out at people, and was extremely, and completely unnecessarily, anal about internal security configurations to the point of being a hindrance to other people's work (maybe his affinity to the excessively-codified system of Jewish religious belief led him to believe that everything becomes better with more arbitrary rules and restrictions). And so on and on. It had been a zoo.
Against this backdrop, I worked. I sat at a desk in the middle of an open space floor, flooded with harshly bright fluorescent lighting, inundated by senseless noise from random conversations all around me and from the fancy coffee-grinder-maker-machine-thing forever grinding beans and humming in the not-too-far kitchenette. People would walk through our section of the open-space frequently, occasionally nudging me in the back of the chair since the passageways weren't wide enough. People would come and sit near me, sometimes taking up to a quarter of my desk, requiring me to move slightly to the side, because they needed to consult with one of my neighbouring teammates. Sometimes they'd stand right next to me, their crotch at an uncomfortable distance from my face, immersed in discussion.
My then manager, the Guru, had one managerial trick he imployed exceptionally well: delegation of responsibilities. Since he had no formal training or degrees of any kind he bullshitted his way through life, playing the role of the facilitator, expertly covering for the fact that he couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag. He was smart enough to know the jargon, to understand all the tech (at an executive-summary level), and could even intelligently discuss technical issues - you wouldn't be too far off if you'd imagine Frank Abagnale pretending to be a programmer - but he always deferred to us when shit actually had to be done. Ingeniously, he turned this weakness to a great strength - he anointed each of us a lord and ruler over our own domains. One was lord of security, another was ruler of the build system, and yet another king of Jenkins, and so on. As sovereign rulers we could supposedly do whatever we wanted within our domains - change things, reject changes by others, and so on. We, of course, would also be responsible for anything that would go wrong. And so we were expected to consult others, and as responsible engineers we did, but essentially we were promised total freedom. This form of delegation achieved several things: a) the Guru was absolved of all hands-on technical duties, and could focus on managing full time, free to engage in intra-departmental politics, jockeying for his next promotion and ever expanding his sphere of influence, b) we became extremely diligent in our work, because the combination of freedom and responsibility with high conscientiousness character trait often found in desirous engineers, which we were, meant that if something went tits up it was entirely our fault, and we couldn't stand for that, and c) we became extremely loyal to him, for he bestowed us with Royal Honors, turning us from mere peasants into knights overnight. But of course, we couldn't really do as we pleased. We were never told no explicitly, least of all by the Guru, but in some way or another we'd always get stone-walled whenever we tried to do something truly meaningful. There were always reasons, some technical, some political, but the end result was that we were impotent rulers, with all of the responsibilities but none of the benefits.
Then there were the tasks we were forced to do, and times when we had to implement things in a certain way, even if we thought it was completely the wrong thing to do. In a radical departure from how the Jedi worked, the Guru forced our hands on many occasions. It was never overtly malicious in tone, we were never threatened with unemployment if we refused to do something, but the Guru persistently argued with us until we capitulated. There were always reasons, justifications, rationalizations - and with enough time and enough repetitions of the same arguments we'd sort of lose track as to why we couldn't just do the damn thing and get it over with, and maybe, like, it was even a good idea after all. I understand that similar techniques are employed in interrogations performed by miscellaneous intelligence agencies. The Guru was quite a natural at that. Of course, this was also largely premeditated, as the Guru preferred to hire people he could control over people that were best suited for the position. Our team handled a variety of different projects and tech anyway, so what mattered is how willing the candidates were to do things outside their comfort zones, how willing they were to do the dirty work. The job description was never phrased quite like that during the interviewing phase - the Guru would adjust his pitch to each candidate, and would gauge their malleableness, often looking for some form of naivete or youthful desire to please superiors in the younger candidates, and certain predictable needs, such as a family to feed or the desire to scale the promotional ladder, in the older engineers. The Guru could figure people in seconds, seeing the hooks by which he knew he could hang them down the line, when he'd need them to do something for him.
Part of the controlling machinations was the classic Divide & Conquer technique, deployed in the guise of introspection meetings. We'd gather every two weeks into a conference room, prepared to discuss all the faults, as well as all the good things, that have occurred in the meantime. This is by no means an exceptional thing, especially in the tech industry, where many prefer to waste hours bullshitting away rather than stare at code that doesn't compile. What was exceptional is the levels of honesty we were expected to display, and just how deep this honesty sometimes cut. Perhaps this was exacerbated by the fact that we each fancied ourselves Lords of our own respective domains, per the Gurus dictum, and so we thought we were fighting on behalf of our imaginary citizens. Whatever the reasons, we were brutally honest to each other. While cathartic at times, it also often generated animosity, and the Guru, ever serving in the role of the mediator, the facilitator, would be the natural middle man to bridge our differences. This way we came to trust and rely on him to keep the harmony within the team, to keep peace between the freshly anointed Lords.
The Guru had been a true degenerate; for him the concept of goodness was arbitrary, and as he once proclaimed to me: "don't be right, be smart". According to him, what matters is what's practical and useful at any particular moment, and that this realization is what makes you a good person, or in his terms - a smart person, which is the only thing that really matters. While his particular brand of moral relativism had very discernible boundaries (he would politic the fuck out of the workplace but wouldn't be an asshole to you over beers, as an illustrative example), he was simply an empty man, one who drew pleasure from manipulations of circumstance and people, and had no internal ideals he held dear or worthy of pursuit. It was all a game of money and power to him.
I left that place with a sigh of relief, richer in materialistic goods, poorer in spirit and much less optimistic in regards to fundamental human kindness. Not too long after I've left the company, it crashed and burned as it failed to generate any sort of revenue for the multi-national corporation that bought them. I guess the suits over at the corporation came to the same conclusions I'd come to in regards to the clowns and critters that worked there, because they were all let go without much ceremony. The Guru, ever the socioeconomic climber, went on to become a C-level executive in another run-of-the-mill tech company, further solidifying my suspicions that the entire Tech industry is governed and run by bullshit artists and self-serving politicians rather than proper techies.
Soon after leaving, I was offered a position with a small fledgling startup in the health sector, and that is how I came to know the Tyrant. He was meme come to life, almost image perfect replication of the millennial soyboy neckbeard, i.e. exactly the type of person I'd be perfectly comfortable being friends with. And he was pretty chill overall, although whenever it came to work related matters he'd transform into this domineering control freak with affectless eyes. Shit's reminded me of the movie Split, only with a milquetoast-ass looking geek. An arm-chair psychoanalysis concluded this was a coping mechanism he had developed from all the years of being bullied throughout his youth. He was rarely interested in my opinion, although he did listen patiently and tried to act professionally about not giving a fuck about it; not dissimilar from the way adults talk to children, when they are trying to be nice to them, only without the compassion and empathy that makes the whole thing really sweet and endearing. To add insult to injury, throughout all of my time with the startup, which was admittedly very brief, he never gave me any sort of access to the company's AWS account. The Tyrant preferred to have the programmers (all four of us) work locally, with local setups running in docker (painfully slow, even on state of the art mb pros), using partial months-old snapshots of databases (causing all kinds of bugs due to developing against partial and often out of date data), and to manually deploy everything to production by himself (which took him entire days at times) - he preferred this insanity over giving us at least partial access to stuff we really needed to work efficiently. This doesn't even qualify as trust issues, this is straight up paranoia mixed with a severe and deeply seated need to control everything. Pure unadulterated autism, in short.
depicted: The Tyrant, minus the frizzy hair and the hipster glasses.
As far as pimps go, the Tyrant was a poor excuse for one. Were he a pimp for real, he'd probably be the one fucking the Johns, fearing his bitches ain't doing the job quite right. The Tyrant was a simplistic brute, riddled with psychological complexes of his own, unable to master himself much less others, his authority stemming from his position as superior in the organizational chart of the company and not from hard-earned respect and acceptance of his subordinates of him as their manager. Pimpology is a paradoxical doctrine: the more effort you exert, the more control you try to gain by sheer force, the worse you do. It takes finesse and deep understanding of the human psyche, as well as technical proficiency, to be an effective pimp. To paraphrase Sun Tzu:
Pimpology is the art of deception.
So when you can, feign incapacity,
And when deploying hoes, appear to have no such plans.
When close, seem to them to be far away, and when far away, seem near.
If the hoe is avid for money, use it to lure her in;
If she is volatile, seize upon that;
If she is solid, prepare well for battle
If she is strong, evade her.
If she is angry, rile her.
If she is unpresuming, feed her arrogance.
If she is rested, tire her out.
If her friends are like family, drive a wedge between them.
Attack her when she's unprepared; appear suddenly when she least expects it.
Transfiguration of a Whore
My idealistic worldview clashed with reality when I started working for a living. Real work had people with different worldviews, different agendas than mine; things weren't done according to the hacker ethos I held so near and dear to my heart. I found a lot of people to be mean, cruel, self-absorbed, self-serving in the worst kinds of ways. Money was king, political power games were the norm and I felt lost in all of this chaos. I did not expect the complete lack of purpose, the vacuous lives people around me seemed to sleepwalk through, fully accepting work's sole purpose as an income generating machine, wasting the vast majority of their time with people they didn't really like, working on products they cared nothing for. In all of this confusion and sadness they turned to drugs, sexual promiscuity, bought into the silly office-politics, went on a skiing trip twice a year and bought a Tesla with the hard earned money they slaved under harsh fluorescent lighting for. Work Hard, Play Hard.
Faced with this reality, I demurred. At first I fought vocally, ridiculed others, snickered at people I perceived as complete morons. Then I whispered my protestations. Then I became quiet, resentful, resigned. I couldn't quit working because I feared that without the safety rails of employment I'd be lost, become adrift. Having lost the blind confidence of youth, I began to doubt the inner voice on which I relied for guidance and which has brought me to the precipice of despair. And I liked the money, god damn it.
The temptation to argue with and fight against the implicit dogma that is constantly being fed to you through the experience of the daily grind is hard to resist. I felt it was my onus to fight against the reality of how things were, if not because they were simply wrong then for my own sake - because I wanted to feel in control of my own environment, to feel in control of my own life. When my struggles yielded little to no results I took it personally - there were the gnawing doubts that I was somehow fundamentally wrong, and I was disappointed at myself for not being able to create the life I dreamt of for myself. I severely underestimated the role of circumstance and happenstance in how my life would turn out to be.
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered,
serenity to accept what cannot be helped,
and the insight to know the one from the other.
But sanity prevailed, and I learned to practice detachment and reassessed my life. Knowing now not to engage in pointless wars I cannot win, I channel my efforts to things that are in my control. I learned to trust and reinforce my inner voice to guide me once more, and when shit goes wrong - I know not to take that personally. Having witnessed degeneracy firsthand, I know now that I have the gift of inner moral compass, a sense of aesthetics, and I rely on it wholeheartedly. I no longer let others dictate my reality by their language and their conceptions of what is ought to be. The confusion and self-doubt are gone, and although I still struggle and criticize myself, these are pure in intent and serve to improve myself, as directed by my own aesthetic sense of what is Right.
Money no longer has any hold over me except in the I-don't-want-to-be-homeless sense (I have not as of yet achieved the heights of philosophical prowess of Diogenes). I have no qualms about going back to the salt mines for brief stints to earn cash when the need will arise, but hopefully I'll be able to position myself so that never happens again. I'm making my own way in the world, focusing on what brings me joy, on what I perceive to be worthwhile pursuits, no longer distracted by what others think, or by random offers that I so enthusiastically jumped on in my youth. The desire to do Great Things is still there, stronger than ever, but I realize that I'll have to do these Great Things in my own way, or not do them at all. Either way, I'll be content for I've been honest with myself and lived my life according to my own will and not someone else's.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
-- Steve Jobs, GPOAT
A Toast to the Irrevocably Damaged
As parting words let us raise a toast to those that were lost to their whoring ways and became incorrigible cynical assholes. To those that have fallen victims to their own intellectual arrogance that presupposes to know everything there is to know. To those that are laboring away at the salt mines, saving just enough money for early retirement at 45. To those forever locked in their decadent boomer mindsets. To all the dickheads who proclaim they "Work Hard, Play Hard" as they drown themselves in alcohol. To those that have fallen for the MBA meme.
*salute*