You are not your badge.

I took a girl that I’d recently met to one of my friends’ birthdays last month. When I introduced her, she made a comment that got me thinking. “This is ______,” I said nonchalantly while I pulled out a cold beer from a nearby ice chest. “She’s an engineer at Apple.” It seemed like the standard sort of faire that goes on at geeky parties where everyone’s knee-deep in a nearby tech company. But she quickly turned to me after we talked for a bit about C++ and asked me pointedly “why’d you tell people where I work?” I tried to explain that it was part of the standard schema for conversation around here. But midway through my explanation, I realized just how much of a tool I must look like.

Douglass Coupland describes Silicon Valley as being “career-o-centric.” I think he’s absolutely right. Even places like New York City, where being an Investment Banker gains you points on some weird wedding game that’s played by people that religiously scan the New York Times’ wedding page (the name escapes me on what this game is – Edlyn showed it to me), seem less career-focused than the Valley. Here, your education and social upbringing is secondary to the company branding on your swag and badge that you wear. Here, your social placement seems predicated by job title and location (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netapp, etc.)

If it was just as simple as we’re all hipster toolboxes, I’d leave immediately for New York City (granted – more hispters, but also more single girls). I don’t think it’s that cut and dry though. The social stratification of Silicon Valley seems like a bad consequence of what happens when you arm a bunch of geeks with money and status.

I’ll explain: your average software engineer in the ‘Valley did not grow up like your average Finance guy. To be a successful architect (the pinnacle of software engineering) at a top company, you have to be sharp as a knife and fluent in your craft to an absurd level. People like this often didn’t have the most fun high school experiences. These are the guys who played D&D religiously, mused the concept of bringing their cousin to ‘prom to save face, and in general weren’t as social as his ‘Finance counterpart. There’s of course exceptions to this horribly-generalized stereotype, but the image holds.

Now imagine that you give this kid, who’s come into his own and has a pretty solid base of social skills thanks to alcohol-infused “mack” sessions in college, a badge and a title. In effect, you give him power and status: the social power and status that was absent in high school and maybe even college too. It’s pretty easy to see why he goes overboard.

But he knows that it’s not really him that has that power – it’s the badge. It’s the job. So just as he wears it with pride and greedily venerates his title and swag like a weird version of a rabbit’s foot, he looks to others to see how lucky their rabbit’s foot is. A little social organization goes on, some people dance, and at the end of the day you have a new social structure predicated on whether you work at Google or Yahoo!

Just as I didn’t really buy into the idea that how cool your car was translates into how amicable you are in high school, I don’t really think I should buy into this social construct also.

Unfortunately, it looks like I already have.