February 27th, 2023 is a blur to me now—a welcomed development, since it was probably my lowest point in recent history, which is saying quite a lot. I remember it starting like most Mondays: with me not wanting to get out of bed, which wasn’t entirely uncharacteristic for me at that point. Winter in West Virginia is brutally grey and lifeless, months of nonstop crises were catching up to me, my whole body felt weak—I’d say I was entirely gripped by ennui but that would assume there was anything left to grasp. I’d felt unengaged from nearly every aspect of my being, except for my relationship. That was going well—we’d gotten back from France a couple weeks prior and that trip was the fuel I needed to get me through the endless muck and mire of the just-closed-series-A grind as the (seemingly) sole competent employee in an organization of people who spend large portions of the workday talking over each other and participating in a self-congratulatory circle jerk. VC-backed SaaS is a hostile place for a gal who just wants to put her head down and work. Despite these circumstances, I’d been working towards crawling out of the familiar desolation in which I’d found myself yet again. It seemed that I could finally start recovering. It seemed that I could start scraping myself off of the pavement and working towards the sense of stability I’d so longed for— the one that’s eluded me my entire adult life. I just wanted to know what it felt like to not be surviving through a highly-personal, cataclysmic, perception-shifting event. To settle in. To have a routine. To be in love. It wasn’t time for that, at least not yet. There was still more for me to learn about myself, about labor, about womanhood fettered by modern convention.
With lofty notions of stability and the possibility of living a comfortable life for once in mind—and knowing that I had a job interview (a “doctor’s appointment” according to the official calendar block) with a really great company at 2PM—I was feeling the tiniest bit hopeful for the first time in a while. That got me out of bed, got me through my morning standup with my team, sync with my favorite partner, inbox clean-up, and up to the last meeting before lunch: a one-on-one with the person I will refer to as my “buddy manager” (more on that later). Feeling good, I was making plans to run to the coffee shop afterwards and get an espresso to sip it while reading more “Eros and the Mysteries of Love” in lieu of a normal lunch. In an instant, those plans—along with the plans I’d been making for a summer trip to Europe with Tyler, daydreams of a wedding in the reasonable-but-not-too-distant future, a long list of dental work I was in the middle of, and a much-needed surgery to take care of my painful ovarian cysts—came to a screeching halt.
Signing on, I saw that (I have no respect for this person so I will simply refer to him as “the dudebro”) the dudebro “buddy manager” was joined by HR. Shit.
What followed will remained etched into my mind as mere “Charlie Brown’s parent” speak—I didn’t need to hear the words themselves to understand what was going on. I remember the cowardice of the dudebro as he hopped off the call and left me alone with HR. I remember crying, I remember cursing a LOT. I remember HR telling me that I would be okay because my health insurance (surely she knew I was having some health issues?) would last for the rest of the month. I conjured all of the composure left in my body, mind, and spirit to throw my most cuttingly sardonic “thank you” at her—mind you, it was 11:37AM on February 27th. The month was over the next day. I was full of the kind of rage that can only reveal itself in intense fear. I felt betrayed. They told me it was a skill mismatch for the role. So how did I manage to stay here for two years? Why did my boss tell my team and me last month that we’re the “dream team” for events moving forward? Why are you doing this when my team is projected to exceed their quota for the quarter after these initiatives we’ve been working on will launch?
I didn’t ask any of these questions. I couldn’t. I could only cry and scream. I was exhausted. I was not ready for another crisis. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I didn’t want to be resilient. I wanted to be at peace. I wanted to be okay. Instead, I was relegated to even more chaos.
Unless you’ve played the part of “cog” in the venture-backed SaaS milieu, you may not adequately understand just how off-puttingly ephemeral it feels. Ephemera can be beautiful, but when its your livelihood, it’s not so much. Tenures are short—two years working at a VC-funded company is “a long time”—and you can lose your job at any time, for any reason. “Move fast, break shit.” That includes your own ability to take care of yourself, with many early employees pouring blood, sweat, and tears into building something new only to be fired and replaced like it was nothing. A few years back, I found myself in a similar situation—I’d just gotten a raise, I thought I was doing alright and “safe.” Not so fast. Sometimes management is bad at setting goals and uses you as a scapegoat when those goals come up short, sometimes they want to change up the role and hire someone new (usually for less) who is more of a “yes man,” sometimes planning is done so poorly that they realize they’ve over-hired, and sometimes you are just a bad fit for your job. Or, at least, that’s what they’ve told me after the last few, which raises the question, why keep me around for so long then? It’s a life lived in near-constant agony. If you’re not constantly hating your job, you’re fearing that you’ll lose it. I have some of the worst PTSD from job losses in the past. After a lot of time to reckon with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s no way to live. To be beholden to a faceless board of wealthy investors; they know nothing about you, only that you have some arbitrary number attached to you (since none of these companies actually make money and their goals are based on how much money the investors want to make) and if they see you as not being as efficient as possible, they can snatch your livelihood away from you—just like that. No income. No healthcare. No support.
Though the work from home lifestyle is mostly good for women (which I’ll get into later), this particular aspect of it is insidious in that, because society is more atomized than ever before, your home is your office and your coworkers are often your main source of socialization. When they take away your job, they take away your friends, and they make you feel unwelcome in your own home. I never realized how quiet and empty this big old house was until the immediate aftermath of “the firing.” We’re discarded so carelessly, and it breaks my heart to think of how it’s accepted as “commonplace,” almost ritualistic. Not to make an overwrought statement about something with an inherent gravitas attached, but in a lot of ways, it feels like a sacrificial offering at the altar of capital. What’s a woman with an email job just trying to get married and live a peaceful life in the country to an industrious serial-founder-turned-investor? My life is undoubtedly worthless in comparison, and an apt atonement to keep him from losing ~1% of his portfolio. (It’s apparently selfish, lazy, or jealous for me to think otherwise.)
In so many avenues for labor, but particularly in venture-backed SaaS, all that is “human” is stripped away from “work” and we’re left with a pervasive spirit of transactionality. It’s difficult to separate what is human in me from what seeks to labor. We trade our hours for often menial tasks and we make some money. I think that for me, these two—humanness and labor—are inextricably intertwined. If I must labor, I must be offered some semblance of stability in exchange. I have never been afforded that. At least not as an “upwardly mobile relatively-high-earner.” I’m not saying that I need to find some higher purpose in my work, but if we—particularly women—are to believe that the trade we made many years ago—family for labor, or rather, being “being beholden to husband” to “being beholden to employer”—was fair, shouldn’t we be getting more out of the deal? How much money is enough to justify that? Employers have discarded me much easier than boyfriends ever have. Managers have seen me as disposable in a way that even the most careless man cannot, management innately views me through a lens of disposability, disposability by design. Marriages are ostensibly to last a lifetime, the average tenure in tech is less than two years. Marriages are to be built on affection, respect and mutual understanding. The employer/employee relationship is always “at will” and designed to fall apart when one side stops needing the other.
Before I get too deep here, I need to throw this caveat out: I like to work. I think our bodies were meant to work, our spirits need some sense of purpose, and a vocation is a good outlet for that purpose. However, a career is no longer my singular focus, I do not have aspirations of being a wealthy entrepreneur, I am content to live within the confines of my salary if it means I no longer must fear the inevitability of becoming outmoded and traded in for a “younger (cheaper) model.” I don’t even think that all bosses are bad. In fact, I’ve had some wonderful leaders with whom I still keep in contact. Ironically, none of them are from SaaS—some are from my time in broadcast and another is from my first agency gig. Looking back, all of these people had a healthy balance of work and life. (Notice I did not say “work/life balance,” because I do not believe the corporate adoption of such a turn of phrase is in any way authentic and has therefore kind of ruined the whole concept.) These people—by and large—have been remarkable at keeping their work and their personal lives separate, creating natural boundaries and allowing time to pass between each while being seemingly disaffected by the tedium of the modern labor market and all that it entails. This is what I aspire to be. I, and so many women, were taught to replace our dreams of marriage and family for dreams of a lucrative career. I, however, do not dream of labor. I did, once. It ended poorly. I caught a glimpse of myself dying alone—after all, you can’t take it with you. So, now, as the tech market is correcting itself, I’m correcting myself as well.
There is a fascinating relationship between womanhood and work, one that I’ll likely spend the next several years of my life parsing and untangling. Pre-industrialization, women worked, and in many ways, their work was equal to that of the man. In fact, “remote work” is a kind of return to that, because the agrarian woman was able to work, often communally, while caring for her children. (An accidental “retvrn” moment.) An oft-cited example of this would be textiles and the textile industry. Pre-industrialization, it was common for women to gather in a home and work their looms while their children played nearby—they could gather and gossip with other local ladies while weaving and keeping an eye on their little ones. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? This kind of proficiency in gabbing, caregiving, and being productive all at once is what the female spirit is all about. (What do we do now—send emails and order DoorDash alone?) Industrialization ushered in a new method of centralized work: more efficient apparatuses allowed merchants to spin textiles in less time, but required workers—mainly women—to clock in rather than to work from home.
What today stands for work, namely wage-labor, was a badge of misery all through the Middle Ages. It stood in clear opposition to at least three other types of toil : the activities of the household by which most people subsisted, quite marginal to any money economy: the trades of people who made shoes, barbared or cut stones; the various forms of beggary by which people lived on what others shared with them 15. In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member: its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution. When one engaged in wage-labor, not occasionally as the member of a household but as a regular means of total support, he clearly signaled to the community that he, like a widow or an orphan, had no berth, no household, and so, stood in need of public assistance.
- Ivan Illich, Shadow Work
What followed was a near-instantaneous upending of femininity—the repercussions of which are still being felt to this day. Marx and Engels both remarked on how swift and relentless it was that industrialization interfered with so many aspects of womanhood—particularly the fact that it was not entirely uncommon for women to be forced to give birth on the factory floor. While that seems extreme, I offer you this anecdote from my recent job search: several interviewers subtly (or not-so-subtly) asked if I was married, if I was planning on getting pregnant or starting a family in the near future, telling me in so many words that my career would not be secure if I did. To me, this is just as disheartening and dystopian—I’m not being forced to give birth and immediately get back to work, which its own kind of horrifying ordeal, but I’m being threatened to have my livelihood stripped of me should I desire to start a family. (Which I do, quite a bit, actually.) Why is it that we must choose?
It’s as if everything about modern life is built around the idea that if we are not “singing for our supper” (contributing to our nation’s GDP), we’re deserving of the punishment that besets us: a standard of living that is declining for all, but particularly hostile towards those who wish to raise children rather than to pursue a career. We’re given a choice that is illusory at best, for in so many unspoken ways—the looming threat of poverty, the myth of overpopulation, the constant scolding that those who wish to have a family are “contributing to climate change”—we’re herded like cattle into a careerist mindset. We are so brainwashed to believe that we are only useful members of society if we are working and consuming, keeping the economy afloat, ensuring that our ruling class and elites continue to get richer and richer, that we will betray our most innate urges in the pursuit of capital. The vast majority of us have absolutely no say in the matter—work is not a choice. It is a non-negotiable part of being alive. It seems like a calculated attempt at breaking the human spirit—and it makes me so angry to think about. We deserve so much better.
Exactly four months after my layoff/firing, I’m about a month into a new job. I’m thankful for it, I can even say that I am genuinely enjoying it. The slower change of pace has been welcomed, I completely forgot what it feels like to not be in “growth mode” (read: knowing your livelihood is just barely hanging by a thread) and it’s nice to not be living in near-constant fear. I know that, eventually, I’ll figure out the balance—I’m happy to say though that in the meantime, I no longer feel out of place in that I’m dreaming of just about anything but labor. I’m still anxious about job loss—I likely always will be—but I’m taking this time of relative peace to recognize what’s most important to me and prioritize from there. I reject the dichotomy and am aware that any meaningful “progress towards tradition” en masse will not happen in my lifetime, so it’s that much more important to suss it out on an individual level. In a sense, I’m thankful for these last few months—I’m relieved to be making money again, but very grateful for the shock to my system that served as a reset and a reminder that life exists outside of work, and seeking joys outside of making and spending money shouldn’t seem like such a radical act.
We’re going to be alright, if we want to be. (And I certainly do.) I can’t even with hardships on “the dudebro” or those sniveling bitch made cowards known as “HR managers.” I just want better for all of us.