A memoir about what's broken in tech and how to fix it
Articles
Shorter pieces on the patterns I've documented: the warning signs, the structural problems, and how to tell when you're being set up to fail.
Doing the right thing is necessary. It’s not sufficient.
From 1995 to 2000, I worked in the Advertising and Marketing departments at the Boston Globe. For most of that time, I was working full-time hours while earning my Bachelor’s degree.
You're not the only person who noticed. Every two weeks I send stories from the book and the patterns behind them — the isolation economy, the CEOzilla trap, and why “culture fit” became a weapon.
Careless People is the story of an insider who stayed silent for eight years. I just published the story of the other choice.
The company called itself a startup. It had been in business for almost twenty years.
Last spring I reviewed Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir about her eight years at Facebook, and I made an argument that got me some side-eye: that the author may be the most careless person in her own book. She watched casual racism, harassment, and the digital colonialism that helped fuel ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, where the complaint buttons rendered as gibberish in Burmese and nobody moderating content spoke the language. Instead of taking action in real time, she saved it all for a book deal. By her own account, she stayed for health insurance.
What four years inside one software company taught me about leaders who are afraid of the truth
The company called itself a startup. It had been in business for almost twenty years.
That contradiction should have been my first clue, but I didn’t see it that way when I joined. I was one of four user experience designers, and there was real work to do: the kind of foundational, unglamorous work that makes products actually usable.
I knew the news was bad before I even opened the developer tools. The education startup’s online learning app was loading with that particular sluggishness that tells you something’s deeply wrong under the hood. Not broken exactly, but struggling.
How to spot toxic workplaces before they damage your mental health and professional growth After surviving multiple layoffs and working across startups, government contractors, and Fortune 100 companies as a designer, I’ve learned that the most dangerous workplaces often present themselves as dream opportunities.
I am a strong advocate for people getting therapy as a way to learn about themselves. I have done it for years, but not every therapist will be able to work with you.
I studied photography when I was in college. The dirty smelly analog kind, the kind when you’re in a darkroom for hours on sunny days developing film and then printing the same image over and over, dodging and burning with homemade cardboard tools until the smell of those chemicals made me dizzy. I learned about storytelling and the rule of thirds too, but for me I learned all that in smelly darkrooms.
New pieces every few weeks, working through material from the book. On deck: what watching a heron taught me about workplace cultures, how I found the Google Weather Frog alive and well, and why financial independence is the only real leverage most of us can build.