Instead of acting annoyed, the HR rep smiled indulgently. “I was a fan too. This is actually a perfect segue to the next slide.” She pressed the button on her clicker.
The new slide showed an old photograph of weRobot’s two founders, geeky college boys in their dorm room, surrounded by a mess of mechanical and electronic components as well as stacks of spiral-bound notebooks. “We believe that there’s no continuing mission more important than improving the lives of the human race through advancing robotics. We want every one of you to feel that you can make a difference, achieve what you thought was impossible, act like Jake and Ron when they started this company with a notebook full of diagrams that no one believed would work and eighty-five dollars between the two of them. . . .”
Amy leaned over to me. “Either that’s a terribly staged photograph, or one of the duo is no good at programming.”
“Oh?”
“Look at that snippet of Perl on their computer. Reading all lines into an array? No chomp?”
I looked at the photograph and then back at her, my face blank.
“Not a coder then?”
I shook my head. “I majored in folklore and mythology.”
Amy gazed at me with interest. “I like this; we should talk more.”
Great, I don’t even get the engineering jokes. I suppressed a rising wave of panic and sought refuge in some homemade chicken soup for the soul.
One of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley wouldn’t have hired a liberal arts major without having seen something in me, right?
The HR rep took out a stack of notebooks and handed them out. “Your first and most important benefit!”
The notebooks turned out to be pads of graph paper. I flipped open mine. Instead of the standard square grid, the sheets were imprinted with unorthodox patterns like spirals, honeycombs, tessellations of animal shapes, a scattering of random dots.
“Don’t follow conventional wisdom,” said the HR rep. “If a problem hasn’t been solved, that means you are meant to solve it! Think impossible . . . and then make it happen!”
“As corporate one-liners go, this one isn’t too bad,” whispered Amy. “Not as ripe for parody as Centillion’s ‘We arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race,’ and certainly better than Bazaar’s shtick of having new employees build their own desks out of two-by-fours while chanting, ‘There should be nothing you can’t buy from us!’ Look at all the eager beavers!”
I looked around at the others in my cohort. Some stared at their notepads, unsure what to do with the strange gift; others looked inspired and drew in them with intense concentration as though they were already designing weRobot’s next great hit.
Amy took another sip of her tea. “Youngsters are so fun to watch. They love to be inspired.”
“Do you think we’re just being fed some lines?” I asked. Amy’s wry tone had me concerned that I had made a mistake. “Glassdoor has really good reviews of this place’s culture.”
Amy chuckled. “Like all their competitors in the Valley, they’ve got the shuttle buses and free nuts and fruits and ToDoGenie credits, and I’m sure they’ll give you as much responsibility as you can handle, plus the stock options to keep you here. But no one really succeeds here without believing the One True Myth.”
“Making more money?” I was a little disappointed, to be honest. Amy sounded like a jaded cynic who believed all corporations were evil, and even I knew that wasn’t wisdom.
“Oh, the money is not what drives people like Jake and Ron,” Amy said. “The credo of the Valley is that all the world’s problems can be solved by a really smart geek with a keyboard and a soldering iron.”
I looked at Amy more critically: ShareAll backpack with a date from a decade ago, Centillion version 1.5 launch T-shirt, Abricot cell phone holder with their old logo. I had seen these as badges of honor, of her tours of service in the trenches of the greatest companies in the Valley, but maybe they were signs of something less admirable, a cynicism that was corrupting and made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere.
“What’s wrong with wanting to change the world?” I asked.
“Nothing, except a lack of humility,” Amy said.
“Well, I think it’s pretty cool that we’re finally making the future instead of just dreaming about it.”
I deliberately leaned a bit away from Amy. I didn’t need her negativity dragging me down on my first day. Besides, the HR rep was finally talking about the 401(k).
*
The team I was assigned to, Advanced Home Automation, had a vague mandate to create breakthrough products for the home, distinct from weRobot’s mainstay moneymakers: vacuum cleaners, laundry folders, and home security devices. Most of the engineers were veterans from other teams, and I got the distinct sense that many of them were here because they wanted to spend more time with their families and didn’t want to compete with the hungry twentysomethings.
To my dismay, I found Amy assigned to my team as well.
“I’ve never worked with a folklore PM before,” she said.
“Building a product isn’t just about coding,” I said. “A PM’s job is to tell the story of the product.” I was grateful to the VP of Product Marketing for having used that line earlier on the baby PMs.
“No need to be defensive,” she said. “I think the Valley needs less techno-utopianism and more sense of history anyway. It will be fun to work together. For example, since you studied myths, I figured your deadlines will at least be less mythical. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean, amirite?”
I groaned inside. Great, she thinks I don’t know what I’m doing and she can just slack off. This assignment did not bode well for my career advancement.
I opened the graph paper notepad from earlier and printed across the top of the page: Advanced Home Automation. I underlined the words three times for emphasis, and then decided to erase the final n and rewrote it as a cursive tail that trailed to the edge of the page. This seemed to be a bolder statement than the original, a symbolic gesture at thinking outside the box.
But the rest of the page, blank except for the spiral grid, seemed to be a maze that mocked me.
“Did you sign up for the seminar from the research division?”
I turned around and saw Amy behind me, leaning against the wall of my cubicle with a fresh mug of tea.
“No,” I said, trying to look busy.
“Here’s a free tip: you don’t need to sit in your cubicle to get paid. They don’t take attendance here. Take advantage of that.”
I’d had enough. “Some of us like to get work done.”
Amy sighed. “WeRobot has some of the world’s most advanced researchers working for them—cognition, computation, anthropology, linguistics, nanomaterials—you name it. These free seminars are pretty much the best part of the benefits package.”
I pointedly said nothing and started to write on the notepad.
What are some unsolved problems in home automation?