Last night, I had the opportunity to talk to a former colleague from Slack. She's a user-experience designer, doing a little research I think, with people she knows, and she had questions about how I was using AI at my work.
I'm not sure where she's originally from, I want to say Peru. Towards the end of our conversation I asked her how things felt in San Francisco with all the ICE horseshit happening. More specifically: is her family still visiting her, how do things feel to her personally, etc.
She showed me the card she carries with her, so she can remember her rights. She talked about how she moves in the world—more carefully, direct, from one place to another.
And she talked about something I resonated with—that when she goes to work, she has to pretend that nothing is happening outside the walls of the office. Like there's a collective amnesia from the hours of 9-5. That everyone switches into "work mode" and in this mode, nothing outside the walls of the office matters.
I've noticed this behavior at my employment as well. We all smile at each other. We pretend there are normal work problems to sort out and nothing else—no murders, no rights being taken away, no falling democracy. We live in an alternate dimension, certain that everything happening outside the office walls is happening to someone else, and for these few hours, we're fine. We're safe. It's amazing how little comfort it takes for us to forget the pain of others.
Right now, ICE isn't going into tech company offices and roughing people up or murdering them. But if history holds, they will, and it's only a matter of time.
Engineers, Designers, Product—these jobs require a great deal of psychological safety to be done well. Engineers don't even like switching contexts from one problem area to another without a real fucking good reason. And even then, most engineers consider such an ask to be a failure of leadership.
And now, if we have any sort of human empathy at all, we have to play make-believe just to get through the day. Pretend that we give a shit about lunch options. Dig deep inside our body for whatever ounce of give-a-fuck we can squeeze out for Jira tasks when people are dying.
For the uninitiated, and bless you, Jira is a product for tracking work that a lot of software companies use. It's been around forever.
Let me be abundantly clear. This is not a new world. This is the world every non-white American lives in and has lived in for centuries. What's shocking to people is that white supremacy isn't protecting them anymore. Renee Good was white. Alex Pretti was white. I hear so much less about the death of Keith Porter.
I keep writing about this shit because I don't know what else to do with it. I have to pretend it doesn't fucking matter to me 40+ hours every week.
