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"I had one of the sexiest jobs in the world. How bad could it be? I asked myself this, too. I worried that I was taking things personally and that if anyone knew I was upset, they’d think I wasn’t tough enough to hack it in our intense environment."

"Playing along felt like the price of inclusion. I spoke up only when it looked like he would become an official manager — my manager"

"Playing along felt like the price of inclusion. I spoke up only when it looked like he would become an official manager — my manager"

"As soon as my complaint with H.R. was filed, Google went from being a great workplace to being any other company: It would protect itself first. I’d structured my life around my job — exactly what they wanted me to do — but that only made the fallout worse..."

"The aftermath of speaking up had broken me down. It dredged up the betrayals of my past that I’d gone into tech trying to overcome. I’d made myself vulnerable to my manager and the investigators but felt I got nothing solid in return."

"I feared that going on leave would set me back for promotion in a place where almost everyone’s progress is public and seen as a measure of an engineer’s worth and expertise. Like most of my colleagues, I’d built my life around the company. It could so easily be taken away."

"After my leave, the manager I loved started treating me as fragile. He tried to analyze me, suggesting that I drank too much caffeine, didn’t sleep enough or needed more cardiovascular exercise. Speaking out irreparably damaged one of my most treasured relationships."

" it was still significantly less than my competing offers. I was told that the Google finance office calculated what I was worth to the company. I couldn’t help thinking that this calculus included the complaint I’d filed and the time I’d taken off as a consequence."

"So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. ... My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job."

almost every surrogate family runs into this kind of issue eventually. real families have traditions around incest but b/c surrogate families don't discharge sexual polarity, eventually this sort of thing breaks down the "family"

the only long-term effective surrogate families are comprised of solely a single gender orientation like the military, amazonian warriors, and engineering teams. (engineering teams that try to integrate a hot girl tend to implode & disintegrate)

at google, everyone's level isn't public under the display name, but it can be trivially looked up and everyone does it and PRETENDS not to have done it i wonder how much of it is just peacocking.... allows for hidden undercurrents of dominant/submissive relationships

at facebook (where the author is now) levels cannot be looked up except at the manager level it leads to far more "effective" working relationships because status is stripped from interactions and it's just all about hitting the psc milestones for the $$$ & FIRE retire

when you strip social ranking from relationships you also strip away sexual polarity. then no one is motivated for their moral crusades anymore everything is very rational, very amoral, very numbers driven

so there IS quite a bit a truth to the idea that fb could just be selling digital drugs & echo cult surrogate families and is "bad" for the hoomans rationalism has no idea how to deal with (or SEE) these externalities except with "have you tried googling it?"

it's also very difficult (and hypocritical) to be paternalistic about how online communities are formed in a culture where "people have the right to fuck and be fucked however they want"