As my annual review rolled around, I found myself on the fence about whether or not to bring up the running list of casual hostilities toward women that added unsolicited texture to the workplace. The company had grown to sixty employees, eight of whom were women: a decent ratio for the industry. But I was idealistic. I thought we could do better.
Over email, I told my mother about the colleague with the smartwatch app that was just an animated GIF of a woman’s breasts bouncing in perpetuity, and the comments I’d fielded about my weight, my lips, my clothing, my sex life. I told her about the list the influencer kept, ranking the most bangable women in the office.
It was tricky: I liked my coworkers, and I did my best to dish it back. I didn’t have horror stories yet, and I preferred things stay this way. Compared to other women I’d met, I had it good. But the bar was so, so low.
My mother had worked for corporate banks when she was my age. I assumed she’d understand. I expected her to respond with words of support and encouragement. I expected her to say, “Yes! You are the change this industry needs.”
She emailed me back almost immediately. Don’t put complaints about sexism in writing, she wrote. Unless, of course, you have a lawyer at the ready.
I was promoted from Support Engineering into something the industry called Customer Success. I was a customer success manager, a CSM. All of a sudden, I had an acronym and enterprise accounts. I had business cards. The cards had my personal cell phone number on them, and the slogans ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN PAGE VIEWS and I AM DATA DRIVEN—the absence of a hyphen still drove me crazy—but I handed them out to anyone who would take one.
The Customer Success team was small: just me and a former account manager, a newly minted M.B.A. who dressed in button-down shirts and polished leather brogues. The solutions manager told me that he expected we would make a great team. I agreed—I liked the M.B.A. and his dry, cynical humor. “He’s strategic,” the solutions manager said, beaming. “And you love our customers.”
Our customers. My inbox and personal voice mail were full of demands from entitled, stubborn unknown men. I thought about all the times over the past year that I had been underestimated, condescended to, dismissed. It was true that I enjoyed translating between the software and the customers. I liked breaking down information, demystifying technical processes, being one of few with this specific expertise. I liked being bossy. But the men—I did not love any of them.
With the promotion came a bump in equity. I still did not know what the shares were worth, and I was afraid to ask the M.B.A. whether he had been offered more when we were promoted. It seemed safe to assume the answer was yes. After all, his work was seen as strategy, while my work was interpreted as love.
Still, even without the equity—speculative money, anyway, I reassured myself—I was twenty-six years old and making ninety thousand dollars a year. I went on the internet and purchased a pair of five-hundred-dollar boots that I knew were fashionable in New York but, it turned out, I was embarrassed to wear in San Francisco—they looked so professional. I donated a little to a reproductive-health-care nonprofit. I donated a little to a local organization that provided mobile toilets and showers to homeless people in my neighborhood. I bought a vibrator with a USB port, because it made me feel more technical. I enrolled in a gym with a saltwater pool that I knew I’d never have time to swim in, and booked an appointment with a hypnotherapist recommended by a crowdsourced reviewing platform. I spent two hundred dollars on a single session, hoping to stop biting my nails, during which I accidentally fell asleep and had an unerotic dream about the founder of the social network everyone hated.
The rest of my money went straight into a savings account. Okay okay okay, I reassured myself, hiding in the server room on bad days, reviewing my bank balance. Escape hatch.
In the spring, the startup released a new feature, a report called Addiction. Addiction graphs displayed the frequency with which individual users engaged, visualized on an hourly basis—like a retention report on steroids. It was an inspired product decision, executed brilliantly by the engineers. Every company wanted to build an app that users were looking at multiple times a day. They wanted to be sticky—stickiest. The Addiction charts quantified and reinforced this anxiety and obsession.
Our communications director had left for a larger tech company with well-established, family-friendly benefits and policies, and had not been replaced. With her departure, I became the de facto copywriter. When I asked for a raise to reflect the extra work, the request was flatly denied. “You’re doing this because you care,” the solutions manager said—and I must have cared, because I kept doing it.
To promote Addiction, I ghostwrote an opinion piece for the CEO that described, dryly, the desirability of having people constantly returning to the same apps, multiple times an hour. Addiction allows companies to see how embedded they are into people’s daily lives, I wrote, like it was a good thing. The piece was published on a highly trafficked tech blog under the CEO’s name, and on our company blog under mine.
The novelty of Addiction was exciting, but the premise made me uneasy. Most of the company was under the age of thirty, and we had been raised on the internet. We all treated technology like it was inevitable, but I was starting to think that there might be other approaches. I already tied myself in dopamine knots all too often: I would email myself a link or note, feel a jolt of excitement at the subsequent notification, then remember I had just triggered it. App addiction wasn’t something I wanted to encourage.
The branding also vexed me. I knew multiple people who had decamped for pastoral settings to kick dependencies on heroin, cocaine, painkillers, alcohol—and they were the lucky ones. Addiction was a generational epidemic; it was devastating. The Tenderloin was five blocks away from our office. There had to be higher aspirations. At the very least, there were other words in the English language.
I brought up my qualms to Kyle. It was like nobody at the company had ever been around someone with even a casual drug habit, I said. It was like substance abuse was an abstract concept, something that they’d only read about in the papers, if any of them bothered to read the news in the first place. It wasn’t just insensitive, but sheltered, embarrassing, offensive. We may as well call our funnel reports Anorexia, I said. Let’s start calling churn rates Suicides.
Kyle listened patiently while I ranted. He took off his floral cycling cap and rubbed the back of his head. “I hear you,” he said. “The question of addiction is a big thing in gaming. It’s nothing new. But I don’t see any incentive for it to change.” He pushed the miniature skateboard under my desk back and forth with the tip of his sneaker. “We already call our customers ‘users.’”
Being a customer success manager was more interesting than being a support engineer, but the title was so corny and oddly stilted in its pseudo-sincerity that I could not bring myself to say it out loud. This turned out to work to my advantage: when I changed my email signature to read “technical account manager” instead, it actually elicited a response from previously uncommunicative clients—always engineers, always founders, and, still, always men.
The work was similar to support, but less technical and oriented toward the enterprise: the big boys. We CSMs were custodians of mutually beneficial long-term relationships. I had a roster of accounts, high-paying tech companies and corporations looking to get a taste of the cutting edge. My job was to ensure that these accounts were getting the most from the tool. While this included helping new companies onboard—provided they were paying a certain amount—it was also the friendly way of saying I would be fired if I couldn’t prevent churn.
Churn was customer drop-off: when a customer realized they didn’t need a third-party product, or forgot to use the tool, or switched to a competitor. Getting bigger was both a blessing and a curse, in this respect. It meant that we were gaining, but it also meant that newer startups had us in their sights. Competitors were coming on the market—smaller, nimbler companies with fewer employees and fresher funding. They were able to offer pricing that we, as a slightly more bloated company, were reluctant to match. They had a higher tolerance for burn.
But churn wasn’t just about pricing or shifting loyalties. As with any business-to-business product, it often arose from neglect, when companies were paying thousands of dollars every month for a tool they forgot could be helpful. This was always the most damning feedback, because it meant that we had been forgotten.
I would meet accounts at their offices—NDA at reception, snacks and flavored water in the conference room, views of the bay from the Engineering cluster—and they would explain, matter-of-factly, that they were paying too much for something their engineers could just build themselves. It wouldn’t be as pretty, but they could roll their own—pull their own solution together. The online superstore had begun selling back-end infrastructure that made this especially easy. Ours was a great tool, our customers said, but they needed to get the cost down.
I had trouble arguing with people who needed to downsize, but I didn’t mind going on-site to try. It always felt like a field trip. I went to well-established corporations and admired the casual, carefree air of people who only put in three hours of work a day. I went to startups and declined offers of iced tea and string cheese. I brought the linen blazer back out. I thought I had such authority.
I didn’t know that customer success managers at other companies were usually young women who somehow didn’t look dowdy in floral prints and never left the house with wet hair, whose socks always matched, who didn’t make too many jokes, who always knew the answers. Women who were much better at the job than I was—far more persuasive. Women to whom saying no was impossible.
It was easy to say no to me. I was always picking lint off my own chest, trying to skate by on good humor. When I met with customers, I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager. I said things like, Tell me what you want from your data, and Let’s define your North Star metric. The North Star metric was always the same: whatever brought in money—as much of that as possible. I sat in conference rooms and reclined in comfortable chairs and tried to cultivate an aura of expertise. It was unclear whose mannerisms I had assumed, what fantasy I was channeling.
Though I knew I was unconvincing, the performance still seemed to work. It was reassuring to remember that the jobs we all had were fabrications of the twenty-first century. The functions might have been generic—client management, sales, programming—but the context was new. I sat across from engineers and product managers and CTOs, and thought: We’re all just reading from someone else’s script.