Welcome to Silicon Valley

How I became part of this system

I was lucky, I live in Silicon Valley. Here I was born, raised and currently work as a product manager at Google. It has great weather, low crime rates, and good school funding. Adults have good dust-free work, and millions of opportunities are open to children. Here people enjoy sushirrito for $ 15 and drink them with $ 6 third-wave coffee. The streets are filled with tesla and drones.

This is a place of opportunity. Many graduates, including myself, immediately after college receive six-figure salaries, and I can also count on fair treatment, bonuses and benefits. At work, I have free three meals a day, as well as an unlimited number of snacks throughout the day. Immediately I can cut my hair and go to the laundry. There is even a bowling alley and a climbing wall.

Welcome to Silicon Valley. Would you like to live here?

When I was in eighth grade, in one of the 6-month semesters, 4 students from a neighboring school committed suicide by jumping under a train. In the second year of high school, my classmate, with whom I went to the library, committed suicide. In high school, each of my peers hired a consultant to go to college. Some paid up to $ 400 per hour for editing an essay, others paid for a consultant to write it for them. My classmates cried because they received a grade of “A with a minus”, cried because their photos received less than 100 likes, cried that they did not go to Harvard. (I admit that I also cried because of this.) They had to stay awake a few nights a week in order to survive seven additional classes and seven extracurricular activities. They went hungry to match “popular children,” stole money from their parents for branded clothes, and they also earned excruciating mental disorders that did not go away even years after graduation.

Welcome to Silicon Valley

In my high school, out of 1,300 children, there were three black students and a dozen students of Latin descent. At my work, in a company that invests so many resources in diversity and integration , there are neither black engineers nor engineers of Latin origin. In 2017, of all hiring professionals at Google, 2% were black, 3% were of Latin descent, and 25% were women. Statistics on senior management are even sadder, as is the case throughout the valley as a whole.

The lack of diversity is striking not only at work - it permeates all aspects of life. All are worn by Patagonia and Northface, all have AirPods hanging from their ears, all go to Lake Tahoe on weekends. And everyone is talking about the same thing: startups, blockchain, machine learning, and also about startups with blockchain and machine learning.

Welcome to Silicon Valley

In my liberal arts college, in which I studied, classmates and I discussed everything in the world: from British literature to public policy, from moral philosophy to socioeconomic inequality. Compare this to conversations in a product management training course, which is always full of recently graduated students. There, even everyday conversations revolve around technology - gossip about the new vice president of the company, plans for how to get a “double increase” from level 3 to level 5 for the product manager in 22 months, discussions where investors drink on Thursdays. ( And yes, there are also problems with alcohol and drugs in Silicon Valley) Try to talk with these people about social problems, and you will very soon see the bored face of the interlocutor, hinting that it is time to change the subject. For example, together with my friend, we repeatedly raised the issue of climate change, since we are very interested in this topic. We talked about the deterioration in air quality after a fire that devastated more than 60,000 hectares of Northern California , and recalled that Google still uses plastic water bottles and straws. We also called for support for environmental organizations during a charity week at Google. Each time we heard silence.

You can earn money by changing the color of the button from green to blue.

In Silicon Valley, few consider climate change an important issueto discuss it, even fewer people think that something needs to be done about this. After all, this will not bring profit. You cannot “shoot” with this. And, of course, this is not related to IT. But you can earn money if you change the color of the button from green to blue, if you launch another food delivery application, if you manage to get even more clicks on advertising. This is how the Valley and the technology industry work. As Jeffrey Hammerbacher, a former Facebook executive, said:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads”

Welcome to Silicon Valley

Homes sold for up to $ 28,000 per square meter . The problems of the homeless and gentrification in the San Francisco Bay area have become so acute that they have received separate pages on Wikipedia. And this happens not only in the city, and this is not even a problem of “uneducated people”. In December 2018, 4,300 students from San Jose State University - more than 13% of students - reported being homeless this year. San Francisco and San Jose are among the 10 worst cities in the country in terms of income inequality. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen.
In 2018, San Francisco acceptedProposal C is a measure aimed at combating homelessness by raising taxes for large businesses. Salesforce and Cisco executives supported the idea , while Square, Stripe and Lyft were against the tax because of the way it was collected.

Would you like to live here?

Some might say that there are companies in Silicon Valley that care for the poor. Some organize annual advertising campaigns. Google gives employees $ 400 each, which can be sent to charities, such as food banks or a homeless shelter. And although Silicon Valley employees can help those in need, at the same time they complain that the tent towns “spoil the view” of the city, complain about the people they claim to care about. Over the past decade, Hyde Street alone in San Francisco has filed more than 2,200 complaints about the homeless , there is evidence of violence against the homeless in an attempt to drive them off the streets.

Welcome to Silicon Valley

Here is all that I have. My parents live here. This is the place where my school friends returned and college friends moved. Here I fell in love for the first time, and here my heart was first broken.
Then my classmates stole my homework and faked tests. Here, parents threaten teachers if they put their children B +, here teachers threaten tutors if they show copies of past exams. In this very place, my friends are pumped up with drugs, slaughter and kill themselves. Here, my friends tried to spoil my relationship, my grades and my career.

Here, dating is everything. This is a place where everyone wants something from you. Here you never know when you will be betrayed in order to achieve a new goal.

That is all I have. But Silicon Valley is no longer my home.

Silicon Valley is no longer my home. I feel the influence of a technological bubble. I feel how my priorities are shifting towards money and a career, that I am starting to ignore those who need help around me, but that’s what is encouraged and how I harmoniously fit into the surrounding reality. I feel like I'm becoming part of this system. Living here, I began to reflect on my school experience, full of suffering and aggression. Every year, a crisis of mental health among high school students in Silicon Valley. I’m thinking about how much social networks influenced my psychological state during the high school with my friends , and I understand how strange it turned out that the same friends now work on Facebook.

I was taught that in any bad situation, there are three scenarios: you can ignore this situation, you can try to improve it, or you can escape.

Ignoring this, of course, is an option, but it will not lead to any positive changes. Trying to improve the situation is a pretty good idea if you have the hope that something can be changed. And you should leave when you are sure that nothing will change and you don’t know what to do with it.

And I don’t know what to do. When I returned here after 4 years, my depression came back with me, as well as anxiety, growing disappointment in humanity, together with a stream of fake and selfish “friends” fighting for the high status.
So I'm leaving. But I hope to return.

I hope to return to another Silicon Valley. In a place where they take care of the mental health of students. In a place where there will be diversity, not only among the people themselves, but also their lifestyle, conversations and interests. In a place where people will realize that their ideal life is expensive for others, and where they will seek to help someone who is hurt.
And most importantly, I hope to return to Silicon Valley, where people will take care of each other and will be ready to work on what will improve our world, even if it does not help increase the number of clicks.

Note translator: Please do not associate my views and the views of the author of the article. Nevertheless, I thought that this could be an interesting insight into how life is arranged there.