Mission

Every tech company has a duty to this world

When I got my first proper job in a real company at the age of 30, the thing I didn’t expect was how much everyone cared. Not about the specific thing they were doing in order to get paid, I understood that we all had to make our nut. The curious thing was that they all seemed to be invested in what the company was actually doing.

The gig was at Skyscanner. My CEO would remind us in company-wide pep talks that he could have been the boss at other big tech companies, but chose us because to be doing what we did meant something, that his most formative moments occurred while travelling. He told us about a friend he made in India, who turned out to be really fantastic at dancing — I had to say, it was a great story. Over time, this story plus some other equally good ones sold me, and I was in. Skyscanner is great, I said out loud, and indeed began a chorus that the rest of my colleagues joined as we repeatedly raised our fists in the air. We were experience vendors, formation catalysts, a shamanic algorithm helping 100 million monthly users find their destination, only to discover that all along, they were actually finding themselves.

Work no longer seemed like toil under this fervour. A zest for getting the world travelling leapt off us and pollenated each squad-room, as if we were all unwaxed citrus and our CEO a mascot airplane zipping through the office with microplane grater wings. Each morning we would consult the dashboards, and if monthly active users had increased to the company target, we would leap for joy, grab each other and embrace, tears welling in our eyes. I would put my arm on the shoulder of someone in marketing I hardly knew and we’d lock eyes. We did it, I’d say, and in the reciprocal nod that followed, more compassion, mutual understanding and humanity was conveyed than any novel could evoke in its feeble lines etched across flat pages.

However there were also the days where the number went down, where we didn’t meet target. The first sound on such days was the piercing cry of the ladies, whose note of grief pitched a horror only matched by that of a mother discovering a dead child. The men, unable to confront the truth of their emotions, would get up straight to their feet. We need to fix this, they’d all say, WE NEED TO FIX THIS, they’d scream, while the women continued to cry in the background over the number of people who would not be finding their flights at the most convenient time and best possible price this month. The men would be frothing at the mouth at this point, hurling office chairs at the monitors, shouting it must be a bug, the fucking thing’s broke, it’s fucking broke!

In the midst of these highs and lows, there did come moments of doubt. Sometimes I wondered if despite all the rhetoric and the PhDs in computer science, that we might not be that important a part of the travelling ecosystem. If our whole service went down, users would just have to call a travel agency, or maybe even check Ryanair and EasyJet themselves. I wondered if the Boeing engines were the more impressive technology, or if the flight attendant checking in bags was actually more pivotal to people’s ability to travel than we were. However these doubts were brushed aside whenever I saw very large numbers on high resolution dashboards.

The next 10 years working across the tech industry made for a rollercoaster of emotions. The missions, the millions of users affected by what we did every day, that seething ocean of lives shaped by the code that I wrote. With time it ground me down, the responsibility became more than I could shoulder. I had children of my own by then and could no longer play father to the world. The decision was made to take a job at one of Canada’s most profitable tech companies, though one I felt by its nature was certain to be more modest in its sense of duty.

Yet PornHub surprised me. I was expecting to be greeted by posters of x-rated models with all their oversized bits popping out, but instead found an atmosphere altogether different. In my first company-wide meeting, the CEO pulled himself into an ecstasy providing a sermon on overpopulation and the impending climate crisis. It was PornHub’s duty to deter the Earth’s people from forming physical sexual relationships, he said, and I saw the cubicles were filled by copies of The Uninhabitable Earth, posters of Greta Thunberg and slogans of "Net Zero.” You could have mistaken the workings of that office for a monastery of yore, as its covenant of ascetics scurried about their business with muted zeal. At every turn, you’d hear data scientists discuss matters of global consequence in grave hushes, debating if there was significant p-value in click-through rates between captions with ‘giant titties’ versus ‘ginormous titties.’

Amongst such noble souls I doubt I may ever work again, yet their objective would not sit straight with me. As a father of 3, I could not with any integrity commit myself to a cause with anti-natalism at its heart, no matter how well intending its adherents. I sought a fresh cause juste, and picked my next gig in line with that passion of mine you are all most aware of.

When I landed my role at Deliveroo, the CEO expounded on his dream to connect a hyper-localised three-sided marketplace which would allow riders to fulfil a mission-critical, emotional purchase in under 30 minutes. It was the first CEO’s dream where I had no idea what he’d just said, but man, it touched me. The perks were good too, though I did begin to pack on a few pounds as I deliveroo’d all three of my daily meals plus a mid-morning milkshake. But one day the service went down, and I was forced to waddle over to the kitchen. There I lifted a flat and circular iron object with an elevated rim lining its circumference and a phallic protrusion by whose means I was able to wield its entirety. Sk-i-ll-et, the word returned to me, and some reflex brought me to place it upon an electrically heated surface, and once hot, pour 3 beaten eggs into its centre.

As I ate the emergent omelette, I found myself beginning to excrete the Kool Aid. I couldn’t help but reflect how much quicker, cheaper and more nourishing it had been to make my own dinner. And I longed for leftovers of my own — some boiled potatoes, fried mushrooms, a bit of braised beef or mapo tofu — that I might have scattered over the coagulating egg as all clumped together softly in its final moments. I wondered if we were connecting people, or moving cooks into windowless centres of mass distribution, while kitchens sat lifeless and restaurants empty.

I looked back at the last 10 years of my time spent on this planet, its ludicrous occupation by working hours.

And I feared that amidst them all, I may have made nothing but money.

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Three Egg Omelette

Fine eaten plain, but improved much by the presence of a leftover something or other. Potatoes, ham, curry, mussels… everything goes, but with judicious application. There are - by no exaggeration - thousands of detailed techniques for making omelettes, but I think the best one I’ve read was in Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal. She claims to be uncertain as to what the difference is between making scrambled eggs and making an omelette, and it is with this comportment of nonchalant ambiguity that best results are found.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs

• Nob of butter

• Toppings (just a little, please)

Beat 3 eggs lightly (about 5-10 gyrations of the fork). Heat a cast iron skillet until it is medium hot, and a nob of butter will skitter and fizzle across its surface. Add that nob of butter, and hopefully having added it at the correct time, watch it skitter and fizzle across the surface. Once the foam has subsided, add your eggs, and jiggle the pan continuously. The shaking of the pan should dislodge bits from the bottom and the runny egg should fall into the gaps. Try and keep the whole surface of the pan covered with the egg, but don’t worry too much if a hole appears here or there. In fact, don’t worry at all about anything.

Once the surface is only lightly unset, start adding your toppings — in my case a handful of spinach and some grated cheese (I may have slipped bacon across the surface at fold time too). Add salt and pepper too.

Tilt the pan and using a spatula of some kind roll the omelette along the tilt, and out onto a plate.

Toppings, in the right amount, at the right time