After my internship at Google, I fled Silicon Valley

I became a Google intern in the summer of 2016. This is my second time working at Google after my previous visit in New York. I chose to work in the company’s headquarters in Mountain View because this is the “heart” of Google and the technology world.

I have never seen Silicon Valley (a comedy with the boys who set up a startup here), although I heard that the film reflects very real. I should have watched it before my internship, but even if I did, I didn’t think everything in real life would look like it in a movie.

The time in Silicon Valley is not so bad. I remember walking around the Mission district, climbing Potrero hill, sitting and eating fruit by Ben Ngu Phu … However, the remaining memories were not very good.

I once heard a Google leader say that an important issue to address immediately was to increase advertising revenue or improve the developer experience. Sitting in a Google bus and looking at the building on the other side, I saw quite a few people who looked like me (a black girl), but they were janitors and coffee salesmen.

That was just one of the reasons why I decided to leave Silicon Valley forever.

I am trapped in a “technology bubble”

Not a market bubble, I mean the invisible bubble – a “quarantine zone” containing people who only care about one thing. Therefore, they do not know what is going on outside the bubble.

I recognized this bubble when I saw an employee focusing solely on their work. Basically, this bubble helps identify the problem the industry has. However, the problem with the San Francisco bubble is that it covers the city all the time.

It seems that people in Silicon Valley forget that there is an outside world with many different interests.

There seem to be only two types of people in San Francisco: working in technology or homeless. Every coffee shop I visit has a lot of people wearing Apple headphones, sitting and typing on the keyboard day or night.

In my opinion, there is a clear cult for this bubble. Industry insiders always think it’s only good to be concerned about the job, while outsiders will look at it with extreme negative eyes.

Silicon Valley is nothing more than a bubble of people focused on work, not care about the outside world. Photo: Unsplash .

I have many other hobbies, and it’s usually unrelated to technology. I realized I couldn’t belong to this bubble.

It seems that people in Silicon Valley forget that there is an outside world with many different interests. Who cares to drive themselves when the transportation infrastructure in their area is so bad?

The “bubble effect” in Silicon Valley made me wonder if technology could help change our lives when insiders always thought they were the only thing that existed.

I’m not “grown up”

Like Peter Pan, the people in Silicon Valley whom I meet are as soulful as children. We can eat anything at work, using the word “campus” (buildings and campuses around schools) to mark the Google buildings where we work. I also experienced competition between women, which I think only exists in secondary schools.

Google headquarters campus in Mountain View. Photo: Tripsavvy .

We arrive at the billiard table and the pubs after 4pm – where Google, Facebook, Apple promise all the benefits of employees. However, I find my needs do not match their preferences.

I want to find a stable job with a healthy balance where people are really open about life outside of work. However, it did not belong here. I feel lost in Silicon Valley. I want an environment that helps me become a whole person, but what I meet is only colleagues who talk about work all day or about expensive meals.

Diversity and racism

I am excited to live in San Francisco, working at Moutain View for the history of the LGBTQ community with large-scale parades here. The food in San Francisco is also very good, the West Coast people are always excited to share with me about city life.

Besides, what I see is the life of the homeless. Every morning, employees of technology firms wait in line for buses to be picked up, nearby homeless people are huddled with cold. On the sidewalk, staff with one hand holding food, the other holding an expensive computer, walked past homeless people sitting just a few meters away begging for food, money and even a smile.

After leaving the car, I walked through the green campus. The people here are mostly white and Asian, they set aside a table for me and I’m the only black.

Once I was talking to my colleague, I interrupted to greet a person who had just passed by and gave the piece of bread I just bought for them, my colleague would ask why doing so because it didn’t solve the problem at all.

I have never met this in other cities.

Next is the issue of racism. In 2018, a report from the Haas Institute showed that while racial diversity is increasing, racial discrimination in schools and neighborhoods has not diminished, even more so.

The high proportion of homeless people is considered one of the dark side of the “technology capital”. Photo: Business Insider .

That’s what I see every day during my internship. I live in Mission District, a place where prices of housing are rising thanks to young people working on technology. Every morning, I walked on the streets, waiting for a shuttle from Google to pick me up. After leaving the car, I walked through the green campus. The people here are mostly white and Asian, they set aside a table for me and I’m the only black.

Silicon Valley has contributed a lot to the world. The most influential companies are stationed here. However, this is not the right place for me, a black girl wants to experience more than sitting around writing adware.

After my internship at Google, I still had a dream of working in technology, but the company I worked with would never be in Silicon Valley.

Source : Techtalk