Blind, Anonymous Tech Job Site, Shows Anxiety Around Layoffs, Hiring

The social network Blind had real juice when I wrote about it in June 2022. It gave 5 million tech workers a place to anonymously talk smack about their employers. Identified only by their workplaces, Blinders traded office gossip, swapped tips on acing technical interviews at places like Apple and Google, and voluntarily shared their Total Compensation — “TC,” in the site’s argot. Blind served as a giant, freewheeling water cooler for Silicon Valley.

Back then, the tech industry was on the verge of what would be a catastrophic downturn in hiring. But Blinders didn’t seem worried. They were too busy trying to figure out how to live like kings. How could they boost their TC to stratospheric levels? What were the secrets to climbing the ranks of a FAANG company, or starting a unicorn? Which employers offered the most lavish perks and the best work-life balance? Here and there, I noticed that a few Blinders were starting to wonder if they should get out of tech before all the jobs disappeared. But the overall vibe was: What’s the best way to get ahead and live the good life?

Three years later, tech employment is in free fall. Since its peak in late 2022, the industry has shed 175,000 jobs. Artificial intelligence is threatening to make the work of coders obsolete, and companies like Meta and Google are slashing perks, gutting middle management, ordering everyone back to the office, and putting employees on performance improvement plans designed to weed out low performers. Tech’s role in our lives has never been more ascendant, but as far as the actual business goes, what seemed like a cyclical downturn back in 2022 has become a full-scale apocalypse.

So it seemed like a good time to head back to Blind and see how people are feeling. What are workers in the tech industry saying, in the place where they have no fears about speaking their mind? How are Blinders handling the seismic shift taking place in Silicon Valley?

The short answer is: not well.

Gone is the single-minded focus on fat salaries and work-life balance. Today the site is suffused with a palpable, sour anxiety. Blinders grouse about being ghosted by job recruiters. They rail against the performance plans being implemented by their employers. Even worse, they accuse one another of lying and cheating. In the old days, Blinders treated each other with respect. The platform felt like something unheard of in the age of Twitter trolling: a true community. But now, not unlike much of the internet, Blind is infused with caustic racism and misogyny. Nobody trusts anyone, and everyone is very tired. Blind used to be a friendly and supportive place for the Lords of Tech to celebrate their ascendancy. Now it’s devolved into “Lord of the Flies.”

Everyone on Blind still hopes they’re gonna make it big someday. It just seems less likely now.

Many Blinders are out of work and scrambling to find a job. They argue about the value of sites like LeetCode, which offers coding education tailored to FAANG interviews. They worry about spending a year studying for their big Amazon interview and then blowing it. And those who do have a job are either looking for a new one, or fretting about how little they make.

“Does anyone here feel like dying because of their low TC?” asked one poster. After four years on the job, they said, their total compensation is stalled at $81,000.

“Been feeling this lately,” replied a Blinder who works at SoFi.

There’s often a weird sense of entitlement when Blinders talk about their compensation. Even with an AI earthquake sending shockwaves up and down Silicon Valley, they still make way more than most Americans — and they kvetch about it anyway. The person at SoFi who feels like dying over their measly pay? “I’m not even at $500k yet,” they complained. “TC $415k.” (For context, median income in America is under $50,000. In computer and information technology, it’s around $106,000.)

Compensation envy on Blind was common back in 2022. But now, when Blinders share their TC, they’re often attacked as liars or trolls. Sometimes people are even accused of inventing entire jobs. “Job market is so fucked right now, all those multi-offer postings are by maga supporters,” one Blinder posted, dismissing anyone claiming that they’d received multiple job offers at once as a right-wing propagandist. In the current struggle for survival, trust has effectively evaporated. It’s every coder for themself — and if you claim to have a great job or a high TC, you must be making it up.

One of the biggest anxieties on Blind right now involves performance improvement plans.

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Nobody enjoys being watched closely by their boss, but Blinders seem to feel that PIPs are more than just an evaluation tool. Some see them as a form of tyranny — something inept middle managers use to meet metrics for firing people, not a test of pure coding skill. Others see any opposition to PIPs as a betrayal of the grindcore mindset — if you’re scared of a PIP, maybe the low performer is you, bro!

“I moved from Amazon to Microsoft because the PIP culture at Amazon completely burned me out,” one Blinder wrote. “The whole thing really messed with me mentally, and I promised myself I’d never go through something like that again. Fast forward to today and Microsoft is now rolling out PIP.” The poster despaired of ever being free of the constant scrutiny. “Do you need to go to a fucking startup or something??” they wrote.

The pile-on began. Some accused the Blinder of being a subpar coder who was too inflexible to take criticism. Others then accused those Blinders of being managers who were too insecure to acknowledge that PIPs are destroying the spirit of teamwork that attracted so many workers to the tech industry. It felt like every other social media platform: a toxic stew of mistrust and recrimination.

One thing almost everyone seemed to agree on? That morale is especially terrible at Meta right now. “We are all hired mercenaries chasing high TC,” one Meta employee lamented. Others complained about grueling hours and what they see as a culture of backstabbing. “I’m at Meta,” another Blinder wrote. “God I wish I wasn’t. And yes I’m interviewing to make that change happen asap. When I started a year ago I thought, ‘Blind suffers from selection bias, etc., it will be just fine and like any big tech company.’ Nah dawg. It be bad.”

The point here isn’t whether the Blinders are right. It’s that in the wake of massive layoffs, many tech workers have sunk into a deep pit of paranoia, finger-pointing — and worse. Back in 2022, I didn’t see much racism and misogyny on the platform. Now it’s everywhere. Blind recently boasted that it had 12 million registered users, primarily because of its expansion into South Korea and India. Blinders might be turning up the racism dial in response to the newbies.

But it’s also true that tech in general is suffering from an outbreak of toxic bro-ism. As a team of sociologists wrote of the tech sector in 2023, “The most striking workplace development in recent years may well be the surfacing of a culture of gloves-off sexism and racism at some firms.” The field has long been dominated by young white men; more recently, women and people of color have begun to make gains.

A lot of the guys on Blind are quick to blame their woes on DEI. One Blinder — a self-described “Indian American born in the USA” — uncorked a truly vile tirade against “Indian women managers.” it ranged from stereotyping about people who are “fresh off the boat” to derogatory speculation about their love lives to outright calling them “overweight and ugly.”

Today, the open, communal vibe I encountered on Blind back in 2022 seems like a relic of some long-forgetten age.

In another post, a Blinder from Adobe asked a workplace etiquette question. “Co-worker brings Indian food to desk and whole aisle smells like food,” they wrote. “How to be respectful and say no to this habit?”

A Blinder from Pinterest tried to step in. “I’m going to assume that this question was asked in good faith,” they wrote. “But next time rather than pointing out the cuisine specifically, just say that they brought ‘ethnic food’ to the office and the smell is particularly strong.”

Their heart was in the right place — or at least near it. But the next exchange obliterated any goodwill:

Apple: Bring big fat beef steak , and make sure to eat in front of him loudly … He will stop eating at desk afterwards.

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Instacart: Stop overreacting you pos. You can eat fish, beef and all the crap that stinks but it’s only Indian food that bothers you. Prick.

Corum: You are the one overreacting. The OP asked the question respectfully. Indian food is really pungent compared to a ham sandwich.

In a sense, ’twas ever thus. Silicon Valley has long struggled with racism and misogyny. As those sociologists wrote, modern tech was founded in part on “an exploitative guest worker program that prioritized entry for East and South Asian engineers starting in the 1960s.” But the Blind I remembered didn’t indulge in X-style hyperpolarization.

Today, the shrapnel explodes in all directions. Men on Blind accuse each other of lying about how much they exercise, and how many women they have sex with. Men who claim to be of Indian descent ask other Indian men how to deal with their white American wives who want to have jobs.

Blind’s recent growth has also come from more women joining the network — and for them, this nonsense is exhausting. “If you choose a career you are a feminist,” a worker from Amazon posted in a channel called Women in Core Tech. “If you don’t have a career you are a gold digger. If you have an opinion you are argumentative, if you don’t have one you are boring. It’s like they were expecting pets and don’t know how to deal with an entire other gender of humans.”

A few men replied sympathetically — sorry you’re dealing with this, it sucks, etc. They got called simps. A Googler responded with a chart from the Financial Times showing a global divergence in politics between men (who are growing more conservative) and women (who are growing more liberal). The Googler cited it as evidence that women have taken up “woke moral purity as a substitute for religion.”

The going has gotten tough in tech. Things are falling apart. Today, the open, communal vibe I encountered on Blind back in 2022 seems like a relic of some long-forgetten age. A spokesperson for the network tells me that, according to their data, the percentage of posts that use discriminatory language has actually decreased slightly since 2022. But the overall volume of posts has grown, so “the absolute number of problematic posts may rise.” Whatever the math, I was heartbroken to see that Blind, too, has gone feral.

In the boom days of tech, the platform’s homepage used to have a running ticker in the upper right corner cycling through a list of current job openings, many of which offered remarkably high levels of compensation. It seemed like both goal and enticement, a mutually agreed-upon brass ring for those who had decided to make a career in tech. Now the ticker, along with many of the jobs it used to list, is gone. For Blinders, all that’s left is a dystopian cesspool of snark — most of it directed not at the external forces reshaping their livelihoods, but at one another. For millions of beleaguered, burned-out users, it’s one more indignity to bear as they struggle to hang on to what little hope they have left.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

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