A letter to my dear, burnt-out tech worker — TAKE YOUR FUCKING LEAVE
I worked in the technology industry for 10 years, from 2013 to 2023. After 2 years, I began managing people in 2015, and continued as a manager until I was done working in tech. So fucking done. Tech will chew you up and spit you out, gnawed and broken; a sunflower seed fished out of a bag full of others just like you, all waiting to be picked, no one realizing that being chosen means being crushed to dust.
I watched the corporate machine ingest my coworkers; bright, energetic, dedicated humans. It sucked the marrow out of us, bled us through until we were sick, exhausted shells of our former selves. We would weep silently in fluorescent soap-scented bathrooms stocked with free tampons when we thought no one could hear us. We would bite the insides of our lips to keep from screaming in rooms where our bosses asked if we were doing enough, if we couldn’t squeeze a few more deliverables out of our people.
We were told how lucky we were to be there, and we felt it. We saw our meticulously designed offices and gourmet lunches as proof, we were soooo lucky. Our growing workloads were signs of how pleased our bosses were with us; surely they meant we would be promoted or bonused soon.
These companies offer paid medical and mental health leave because they HAVE TO. They want to attract talented, dedicated people, and in order to not have class action lawsuits on their hands every few years, they absolutely need to provide a ton of support for the type of workers they attract. These people will pour their hearts and souls into their work, and in America, we have zero workers’ protections.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
Don’t wait for permission.
Don’t wait for your workload to lighten.
Don’t wait for your body to revolt in pain or disease.
If you feel like you’re barely holding on to your sanity but are waiting for the perfect moment when things finally calm down to just breathe again…
If work feels like a never-ending shitstorm of urgent demands, shifting priorities, unrealistic expectations and politicking coworkers with no bright spot in sight …
If you can’t remember the last time you felt connected with all the best parts of yourself, but your mind is constantly cycling through everything you’re doing wrong all day…
TAKE YOUR FUCKING LEAVE!
It seems like it should be a no-brainer; we literally get paid time off to not work when we’re sick. But for some reason — the way our lives are in America, where the constant thrum of “more is better, do more, be better”, the desperate clinging to stability in the face of ever-impending ruin — we are terrified of what we will lose. What will we lose though? What have we not already lost?
How We Got Here
During the pandemic, tech workers gained an unprecedented type of collective power as we all shifted to working from home. We owned our time and our workspaces in a new way.
Work from Home
This wasn’t easy, at all — in fact, it seemed that the challenges of remaining productive while working from home drove an incredible amount of progress.
Parents were drowning in both children and work, simultaneously. I was sneaking outside to pee in a coffee can rather than risk my then 1 and 5 year old children catching a glimpse of me, realizing mom was still home and not “at her job”, and melting down in screaming fits until I came to spend a little time with them. Our employers couldn’t ignore this -- our kids were literally popping up on our screens at work to cry, hug, yell, nurse, or just find comfort being together during the most bizarre and unprecedented time in our lives.
People who lived alone were facing the opposite kind of unprecedented challenge -- going for days or even weeks on end without human connection.
Some workplaces offered new types of leave or new stipends for furnishing home offices; some allowed individuals facing personal challenges to reduce their work responsibilities or shift to less demanding projects.
Black Lives Matter
Then, in another radical culture shift, the murder of George Floyd brought systemic racism and Black Lives Matter to the forefront of our national conversation. Suddenly, it wasn’t taboo to say “white supremacy in the workplace” or acknowledge institutional racism. Many big tech workplaces created space for dialogue and education that were long overdue in corporate America. It seemed the tide might really be turning from “representation” of the historically excluded majority — so-called “minorities”-- to actual integration.
The Economy Stalled
So what happened? The economy ground to somewhat of a halt. Inflation, plus tech’s massive over-investment in hiring and growth during the early pandemic period, combined with the staggering liability of very expensive, very large, very empty office buildings.
Tech executives got scared by the idea of less money and less growth. They saw how much power workers had gained; saw their payrolls growing and bottom lines shrinking. They realized they needed to claw back their power in order to continue the “infinite growth” facade, and in order to do that, they had to relaunch the captialist patriarchy.
Mass Layoffs Changed the Game
Mass layoffs meant thousands of new job seekers flooded the market at once. Those who remained employed became fearful of losing their jobs, since laid-off folks were lining up to interview for any open roles they could find. Salaries were slashed an estimated 20% on average; companies yanked jobs away from HCOL markets like San Francisco, NY and Seattle where workers command the highest salaries, moving them to mid-range markets where they could pay 30-40% less for the same work.
DEI Became a Bad Word
And a growing wave of anti-affirmative action, anti-DEi cultural sentiments against “identity politics” led to squashing the already minimal corporate DEI efforts gutted these departments.
These retaliatory actions against workers had an extreme chilling effect. A number of well-known tech companies began preventing employees from openly discussing “controversial” topics on company message boards or at work events.
Workers became even more repressed than they had been pre-pandemic, as workplaces began demanding they return to the office for lower wages and higher expectations than ever.
We came to realize there’s just one person who cares about us
All this is to say…. Rest is resistance. No one cares about you and your wellbeing like YOU. Not your boss, not your VP, not your work bestie. If you work someplace with paid medical leave and you haven’t used it to bolster your mental health, DO IT NOW!
