One reviewer of Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley wrote:
Quoted from review of Work Pray Code on Amazon Accessed 12:43 pm 4/21/2022
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www.amazon.com]
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Faithful Reader
2.0 out of 5 stars And what happens when you leave the company?
Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2022
I know Palo Alto and the Valley well and have since mid-70s.
The author did exhaustive research, for which kudos, but she missed the most important stuff. Specifically, the high turnover, a k a burn out, in the Valley employers, which is anticipated and planned. All she really describes is how the tech giants wring a little more time out of people before kicking them to the curb.
The people she mentions who are older than 40 are almost all no longer tech employees...
One Indian woman has a daughter, no mention of a father except by negative inference, that as an immigrant from India, she has nobody local to help raise her daughter. So her employer fills that role.
What happens to the girl when mom changes, or just loses, her job? Oops.
In an interview Carolyn Chen answered this question. In Silicon Valley, employees get their sense of wholeness and community from work, rather than outside work, friendships outside of work, faith communities and service outside of work. They work such long hours they dont have the time for outside activities so become dependant on work.
Professor Chen warns of the trap that awaits them:
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Companies aren’t families, they’re not faith communities.
As soon as you’re not able to perform anymore or you’re not as productive, you’re let go. So that unconditional love or belonging is kind of this fiction.
And when companies use words like “devotion, love, purpose, and authenticity”—words that really belong in spaces like your community, friend group, or neighborhood where love might be unconditional— employees’ love and devotion to work becomes unconditional.
When I interviewed people who kind of had a crisis of faith where they discovered their company lied to them or wasn’t as ethical as they thought, it really broke people because they had this faith.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/2022 04:00AM by corboy.