You may feel invisible in Silicon Valley
/Art by Tithi Luadthong
It’s easy to feel completely invisible in Silicon Valley. I don’t know how everyone else who’s looking for work during the pandemic is getting through it, but I’m remarked by how little things have changed for me, and that’s not a good thing.
I started my career in UI/UX design over 13 years ago when I was discovered by the Vice President of R&D at Samsung in San Jose. Back then, I had a little fledgling website portfolio with examples of UI design, 3D modeling and game design examples. I was in my early 20s and had been marketing my skills on Craigslist, of all places, trying to be the owner of my own destiny and making about as much as a Starbucks barista. Samsung really jump started my professional, white collar, career in ways I could never have anticipated. Since then I’ve had a rather blessed career in a lot of ways, and I can honestly say I’m proud of myself. I realize pride is expensive so rather than list my accomplishments or go on at length about myself, feel free to take a look yourself and come to your own conclusion on my competence and skill. My Portfolio.
…Even with all of this under my belt, people have no idea what they are looking at…
It never fails to amaze me the sheer volume of recruiters that want to talk to me RIGHT NOW at any given time. Four years ago I had a particularly challenging week when I was looking for work where I had received over two hundred inquiries by recruiters… And not a thing came of it.
The week kicked off at 4:45am Monday morning when an Indian recruiting company called me explaining Apple was looking for someone with my exact skills and they wanted to represent me. They were only sending over three resumes to the hiring manager and I was the first. For those of you not in tech, this isn’t all that uncommon. Keep in mind this is just a recruiter wanting to shove my resume at someone. It’s not an interview, and it’s not a job offer. By Saturday morning I had received over 250 recruiters reaching out to me for various jobs and had spoken over the phone to 75+ people including a guy in New York who called me at 1am Thursday morning to tell me about an exciting opportunity somewhere, for some company, doing something. I didn’t leave the house that entire week. As soon as I would get off the phone it would ring again, and I can’t tell you how many call waiting notifications interrupted my chats. It was a complete shock when a month and a half later, not one of those recruiters came back with an interview, not one.
That week was the beginning of a new phase of my life where every few months it would be like this - a complete, unmanageable mess that wouldn’t yield any results and, worst of all, it was happening at predictable intervals every six weeks. I knew I had to do something different as it was starting to kill me and the bills were starting to pile up.
I decided to change how I marketed myself. Rather than just a UI/UX guy with a host of other skills, I spun my whole portfolio toward product and service design and built my site Alex The Actualizer. I had a third act twist though, what if recruiters could no longer “cold call” me? What if, instead of sitting at my computer sending my resume to hundreds of people asking for it, I told them they could get it from my website and, most potently of all, what if I made them fill out a short questionnaire before getting to my calendar to filter out the people just building lists?
Then things turned into this:
“WE’VE GOT THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU! YOU’RE A SHOE-IN! DROP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING AND CALL ME AND EMAIL ME YOUR RESUME NOW”
Nice to meet you. I’d love to interview for this opportunity. You can find my portfolio, resume and a link to my calendar here: www.AlexTheActualizer.com
NO! I DON'T WANT TO GO TO YOUR WEBSITE AND CLICK A BUTTON. JUST EMAIL IT TO ME AND THE OTHER HUNDRED PEOPLE WHO WANT IT! CALL ME NOW! NOW NOW NOW!
(I’m skipping over the times the recruiter tries to convince me there is something special about them or their agency, that the opportunity holder hand picked them for this very special and elite position because half of them say that and it doesn’t change a thing.)
I figured something like this would happen, but I was more remarked by how many recruiters would actually go to my website, browse it, download my resume, fill out the questionnaire, choose a time to speak to me and then just vanish. No call, no email follow up, nothing. The questionnaire was to filter out recruiters that didn’t have serious opportunities. Making them choose a time on my calendar was to give us an uninterrupted chance to make sure I was a good fit. Wishful thinking, huh? It was happening so regularly I thought there was a bug in my system, or the directions weren’t clear, or something, somewhere wasn’t working right.
I wasn’t prepared to learn the truth.
Every so often, every few months, someone would follow through enough and I would get either a digital or onsite interview. This usually came at the cost of me having to be overly “flexible”. Everything from dropping my rate by 35% to being willing to show up a second time after I sat in a lobby for hours because the person I was suppose to be interviewing with just disappeared to going back to “work” with clients who were already past due on money they owed me.
Two years ago, after a fairly ordinary interview, I was offered a job at Equinix (the literal backbone of the internet) in Foster City for $35 less an hour than we had discussed. It was an hour drive from my house. My first day on the job I sat in an empty lobby for three hours trying to get a hold of anyone on the team before I turned around and went home. The second day they led me into a small, cramped office with seven people crowded around one large desk with their laptops and explained to me that even though I had passed 15-20 empty cubicles on my way to this room, this would be our work space. My “boss” then proceeded to push me a stool as there was no more room at the table and had the nerve to say, “You can work remotely on Wednesdays, and if you get here early enough there is free coffee and cereal in the break room.” I surveyed the nervous, crushed eyes of everyone in that room under this idiots thumb and said, “You all deserve better than this. They can afford it, but you limit yourself when you don’t realize your own worth. Remember this day, the day a new hire walked out.” This oppurtunity was brought to me by the recruiting company Creative Circle and the letter M for mediocrity.
I wish I could say that gig at Equinix was a fluke. Any time I would make it this far in the process some horrendously ridiculous thing would happen.
Last year, I had been working off and on for a Canadian company designing a mental health app that I legitimately believed in only to have the checks start coming further and further apart. They seemed shocked when I went “pencils down” after follow up with them eight times on one bill to which they said, “Just keep working, we’ll get caught up eventually.” The contract called for a net 15 pay period, they were 75 days over due at this point.
Last year, I accepted a 1099 contract from a friend and neighbor that had me working for the city of San Francisco creating 3D models of the various necessary underground infrastructures of the city. In other words, I was 3D modeling sewers and water transport structures from draftsman drawings. I was suppose to be able to go in, collect project assets and then produce my deliverables at my own pace, on my own time, from wherever the damn well I pleased. This was mandated by Federal Law according to the outline of the contract. I was surprised to learn my first day that the project lead wanted me on-site 40 hours a week in a hazardous materials storage basement that wasn’t rated for human habitation, “I’ve been working down here for years and nothing bad has happened to me.”
After gently explaining to him that not only was none of this in my contract but it was literally illegal for him to be requesting it, my team and I wrote a letter and got us moved out of the basement, where some of them had been working for years, to a portable building in a parking lot of a waste water processing facility. I acquiesced to work 40 hours a week. That was before the checks stopped coming. I came to learn in full detail that my friend and neighbor who was the “middle man” in the contract and was taking a serious cut had some serious, and I mean serious, substance abuse problems in her house. She argued that some language in the contract we signed allowed her to “pay me when she wanted”. It took me seven months to be paid in full. She had the gall to present me with a new contract that stuck in a 60 day pay period but was so vaguely worded no one in their right mind would sign it.
On a lighter note, I recently had a seven hour long interview with First Republic Bank where they, very early on, stopped interviewing me and started asking me how they should be doing their own job like it was their first day and I was their new boss. I was honestly surprised when the recruiter suddenly disappeared after that one.
Mind you, all of these examples were from a pre-COVID-19 world.
The truth I wasn’t prepared for…
The truth is, no mater how good you are, how sought after you are, you can’t automate out the ubiquitous human mediocrity our culture fosters in people.
I knew going into art and design for a living was going to be hard, that I would have to develop a thick, nearly impenetrable amour to replace my flesh and bone. And to add to it, I knew I had to refine my skill set to a speed and precision that would seem nearly inhuman to overshadow the fact that I am a high school drop out who never earned a degree from an accredited college. I knew that I would have to find a way to turn those culturally taboo facts into part of the story line of Alex, the actualizer. To refine my presence and presentation to rapture a room while not scaring off the listless masses who never followed a dream, ended up marrying a spouse out of fear of being alone, and ultimately live a listless existence challenged only by their morning coffee.
One of my best friend was sitting at my kitchen table last night. A man with multiple advanced degrees in art and science who works for UCSF building 3D models from scans of children’s hearts so the doctors can practice before a major operation. He sat there, fine tuning the model of an 8 year old’s heart for use in VR and 3D printing when he said;
”You’re not invisible, Alex. You’re a levitating monolith blocking out the light from the sun. The monkeys surrounding you lack the depth and complexity to understand what they are witnessing.”
I wish I had an emotionally or intellectually satisfying ending to this story. I wish I could tell you that I found a button, somewhere, on some website that made everything go. I wish I could tell you about a sagely old man who helped me figure it all out, but no. I woke up this morning feeling like the one man brave enough to approach the levitating monolith above my head and with the audacity to ask it “Why?”
