we belong

I am about 70% robot and 30% extremely sentimental and emotional person, generally in series rather than in parallel. But last week’s Igalia summit was a tidal wave of feelings, unexpected but completely welcome. Some of those feelings are ones I’ve already shared with the exact people who need to know, but there are some that I need to share with the Internet. I am hoping I’m not the only one who feels this way, though I don’t think I am.

A lot of us are new and this was our first summit. Meeting 60 or 70 people who were previously 2D faces on a screen for half an hour a week, at best, was intense. I was told by others that reuniting with long-time friends/colleagues/comrades/whatever words you want to use (and it’s hard to find the exact right one for a workplace like this) who they hadn’t seen since pre-pandemic was intense as well.

For me, there was more to it. I doubt I’m alone in this either, but it might explain why I’m feeling so strongly.

I tried to quit tech in 2015. I couldn’t afford to in the end, and I went to Google. They fired me for (allegedly) discriminating against white men, in late 2017. I decided it was time to quit again. I became an EMT and then a patient care coordinator, and applied to nursing schools. I got rejected. I decided I didn’t want to try again because I had learned that unless I became a physician, working in health care would never give me the respect I need. Unfortunately, I have an ego. I like to think that I balance it out with empathy more than some people in tech do, but it’s still there.

I got a DM in 2018 from some guy I knew from Twitter asking if I wanted to apply to Igalia, and I waited three years to take him up on it. Now I’m here.

Getting started wasn’t easy. The two weeks working from the office before the summit wasn’t easy either. But it all fell away sometime between Wednesday and Friday of last week, and quite unexpectedly, I decided I’m moving to Europe as soon as I can, probably to A Coruña (where Igalia’s headquarters is) at first but who knows where life will take me next? Listing all the reasons would take too long. But: I found a safe space, one where I felt welcome, accepted, like I belonged. It’s not a perfect one; I stood up during one of the meetings and expressed my pain at the dissonance between the comfort I feel here and the knowledge that most of the faces in the room were white and most belonged to men. I want to say we’re working on it, but our responsibility is to finish the work, not to feel good that we’ve started it. That’s true for writing code to deliver to a customer, and it’s true for achieving fairness.

I am old enough now to accommodate multiple conflicting truths. My desire to improve the unfairness, and to get other people to open their hearts enough to risk all-consuming rage at just how unfair things can be, those things coexist with my joy about finding a group of such consistently caring, thoughtful, and justice-minded people — ones who don’t seem to mind having me around.

I’m normally severely allergic to words like “love” and “family” in a corporate context. As an early childhood trauma survivor, these words are fraught, and I would rather keep things at work a bit more chill. At the same time, when I heard Igalians use these words during the summit to talk about our collective, it didn’t feel as menacing as it usually does. Maybe the right word to use here — the thing that we really mean when we generalize the words “love” and “family” because we’ve been taught (incorrectly) that it can only come from our lovers or parents — is “safety”. Safety is one of the most underrated concepts there is. Feeling safe means believing that you can rely on the people around you, that they know where you’re coming from or else if they don’t, that they’re willing to try to find out, that they’re willing to be changed by what happens if they do find out. I came in apprehensive. But in little ways and in big ways, I found safe people, not just one or two but a lot.

I could say more, but if I did, I might never stop. To channel the teenaged energy that I’m feeling right now (partly due to reconnecting with that version of myself who loved computers and longed to find other people who did too), I’ll include some songs that convey how I feel about this week. I don’t know if this will ring true for anyone else, but I have to try.

Allette Brooks, “Silicon Valley Rebel”

We lean her bike along the office floor
They never know what to expect shaved into the back of her head when she walks in the door
And she says ‘I don’t believe in working like that for a company
It’s not like they care about you
It’s not like they care about me’

Please don’t leave us here alone in this silicon hell, oh
Life would be so unbearable without your rebel yell...

Vienna Teng, “Level Up”

Call it any name you need
Call it your 2.0, your rebirth, whatever –
So long as you can feel it all
So long as all your doors are flung wide
Call it your day number 1 in the rest of forever

If you are afraid, give more
If you are alive, give more now
Everybody here has seams and scars

Namoli Brennet “We Belong”

Here's to all the tough girls
And here's to all the sensitive boys
We Belong
Here's to all the rejects
And here's to all the misfits
We Belong

Here's to all the brains and the geeks
And here's to all the made up freaks, yeah
We Belong

And when the same old voices say
That we'd be better off running away
We belong, We belong anyway

The Nields, “Easy People”

You let me be who I want to be

Bob Franke, “Thanksgiving Eve”

What can you do with your days
But work and hope
Let your dreams bind your work to your play

And most of all, the Mountain Goats, “Color in Your Cheeks”

They came in by the dozens, walking or crawling
Some were bright-eyed, some were dead on their feet
And they came from Zimbabwe, or from Soviet Georgia
East Saint Louis, or from Paris, or they lived across the street
But they came, and when they finally made it here
It was the least that we could do to make our welcome clear

Come on in
We haven't slept for weeks
Drink some of this
This'll put color in your cheeks

This is a different kind of post from the ones I was originally planning to do on this blog. And I never thought I’d be talking about my job this way. Life comes at you fast. To return to the Allette Brooks lyric: it’s because at a co-op, there’s no “they” that’s separate from “you” and “me”. It’s just “you” and “me”, and we care about each other. It turns out that safe spaces and cooperative structure aren’t just political ideas that happen to correlate — in a company, neither can exist without the other. It’s not a safe space if you can get fired over one person’s petty grievance, like being reminded that white men don’t understand everything. Inversely, cooperative structure can’t work without deep trust. Trust is hard to scale, and as Igalia grows I worry about what will happen (doubtless, the people who were here when it was 1/10ths of the size have a different view.) There is no guarantee of success, but I want to be one of the ones to try.

And we’re hiring. I know how hard it is to try again when you’ve been humiliated, betrayed, and disappointed at work before, something that’s more common than not in tech when you don’t look like, sound like, or feel like everybody else. I’m here because somebody believed in me. I’m glad both that they did and that I was able to return that leap of faith and believe that I truly was believed in. And I would like to pass along the favor to you. Of course, to do that, I have to get to know you a little bit first. As long as I continue to have some time, I want to talk to people in groups that are systematically underrepresented in tech who may be intrigued by what I wrote here but aren’t sure if they’re good enough. My email is tjc at (obvious domain name) and the jobs page is at https://www.igalia.com/jobs. Even if you don’t see a technical role there that exactly fits you, please don’t let that stop you from reaching out; what matters most is willingness to learn and to tolerate the sometimes-painful, always-rewarding process of creating something together with mutual consent rather than coercion.

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