Historically in the United States, the concept of “paid time off” has been a controversial one. The U.S. is the only industrialized Western nation to have zero national policy around paid parental leave in the world; some companies, some of which I have called customers, who are large multi-national companies with thousands of employees, have zero recognition for parental leave at their U.S. locations, and so when employees become new parents, if they choose to take time off, it’s deducted from their paid time off (PTO) allotment. We’re also the only Western country that does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacation leave, sick leave, or federally recognized holidays. These benefits are considered matters of agreement between an employer and an employee.

So it would appear that the U.S. values capitalism, productivity, and work, work, work as its number one priority. And it values human life or human health very little to not at all (we will not discuss healthcare in this post, though, as that is its own disgusting can of worms). It’s a wonder why people want to continue living here sometimes, self included.

But that idea inside, when you are living in a country that has egregious laws, or lack of laws, around paid time off, it would initially seem to be a sort of dream when you are finally employed by a company that actually has what is known as an “unlimited PTO policy.” The average American company across industries only offers around 10 days of PTO per year, so… unlimited? WHAT A DREAM LIFE, right?

Perhaps initially, it may seem that way. That’s why so many tech companies list it as a “benefit” or “perk” when you visit their Careers page or see one of their job listings on sites like LinkedIn. That’s why when recruiters do phone screens with potential candidates, it’s one of the very first perks they note on their calls. But in reality, it’s much more nuanced than this. No, just because you work at a company that has unlimited PTO does not mean you can just take off for half the year, a quarter of the year, or even a full month. Nope. They expect that you will still work as you would normally work as if there were a set number of days you could take off per year.

As an HR professional once told me pointedly, “‘Unlimited PTO’ is not a benefit to the employee; it’s a benefit to the company,” she said. What this means is: the day you decide you want to leave your company (or said company fires/lays you off), the company will be required to pay out zero accrued PTO days because you didn’t accrue anything; there’s an “unlimited” policy, remember? The company wants to “owe” its employees as little as possible, and this is their way of getting there while also at the same time appearing to do something that is beneficial and “perk” like for its employees. Yet, hmmmm. Despite having an “unlimited” policy, pretty much all companies that have this policy in place still require you to “log” PTO so that it’s still be tracked (to potentially be used against you later for baseless reasons). Fun, right?

“So then, how much PTO are you expecting I actually take with this policy?” I responded back to this HR professional.

She smiled. When HR professionals smile, you should really never trust them. Every time they smile, they are just lapping up their perceived power in the conversation. “You should take however many days you would have taken if you were able to accrue PTO at your previous company.”

Here is where I smiled back. “Well, it’s funny you say that because the last time I actually accrued PTO, I had 23 PTO days, 4 summer days, plus the week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day off,” I said to her. “So in other words, here, do you suggest I continue taking 31 days off?”

Her smile faded. She paused, wrinkled her brow, unsure of how to respond. Frankly, I don’t remember what her response was to that in the end because it was so plainly insipid. But I did remember to tell her at some point of this conversation, “If the stance of HR at this organization is that ‘unlimited PTO’ is a benefit to the company and not to its employees, I would suggest that you stop having our recruiters talk so enthusiastically about it during their phone screens with prospective candidates, and also to remove it from our Careers page as a listed perk.”

That was when I made it clear to our HR professional that I wasn’t going to take bullshit explanations. It was also probably when they decided to wage a form of war against me. At the end of the day, stupidity and hypocrisy need to be called out, and I don’t really care if they enjoy it or not.

I once worked at a company that had “coffee klatches” where you could get to know people with whom you do not normally work through “coffee appointments.” An automated script would pair colleagues together based on “shared interests” you’d identify in a Google form. It was a voluntary activity, but a way in which you could get to know others across the organization, and thus would build work culture. I decided to participate in it to try it out.

I got paired up with someone who… let’s just say, from the surface level, you’d think we had shared interests, but we absolutely did not. Let’s call her Anna. We both wrote in our Coffee Klatch form that we both loved “travel.” In the last year, she had traveled to X country, and after telling her I was planning to go to X country in the next month, she eagerly shared her “must see/do” list with me. As someone who always loves to share packed lists of sights to see, nooks and crannies that most tourists would miss, and local eateries complete with cuisine type, what dishes to try, and price expectations, I jumped at the chance to look at her list.

I opened up the document to discover a flight itinerary, hotels booked, and a couple lines pertaining to a Hop-On, Hop-Off sightseeing bus schedule (literally, all this section said was, “Pick up at Hotel at 8am; Last stop at hotel at 6pm”), in addition to a few restaurants (no descriptions, just names). If you aren’t familiar with this company, it’s a mainstream tourist company that allows for easy double-decker bus transport from different tourist destination sights in specific cities around the world. Let’s be clear: I don’t really care that she used a sightseeing bus to get around, but this bare-bones document didn’t have any details — no sights, nothing about what to look out for – it had nothing. This was not the kind of “list” I was expecting, and I was pretty baffled that she would send something so barren to me. I genuinely thought she had made a mistake and sent me the wrong list. How would a hop-on, hop-off bus pick-up and drop-off time from her booked hotel me plan my trip…?

Anna was so excited to hear about what I thought of her list. She came to my desk and asked my opinion. “Did you find it helpful?” Her eyes were overflowing with hope and the desire for positive feedback.

“Hey!” I said, startled. “So, I opened the doc, but all I saw was your flight schedule and a hop-on, hop-off bus start and end date each day. Was this a mistake?”

Anna’s face immediately fell. From her outward expression, she was part confused, part hurt, and part angry. “No, that’s the right doc. I just wanted to share it so it might help you with your trip planning,” she responded slowly.

Oh, crap. She thinks I’m a jerk now, I thought. “No, no! It is helpful! Thanks so much for sharing! I was just thinking it might have a list of specific sights or something…”

It was too late. Anna had decided I was an awful person. She had no idea why I would dislike her awesome list. She eventually trailed off and started a conversation with another colleague. Later, I learned that she told a work friend of mine that I was “rude and passive aggressive.”

To be fair: Yes, we both do enjoy travel. But we do not travel the same way, and therefore could not really help each others’ travel journeys. So the next time you think you have a common interest with someone, dig a little deeper and ask the probing questions, and don’t just assume you will be joined at the hip with them.

In the tech industry, and in every industry as well as in life in general, you should always be aware of people who are looking to take advantage of you. These people are only out for themselves to gain and have no care in the world for you at all, and if you can, be polite and do not egg them on. They will take you for everything you are willing to offer them, and then some, with zero regard for you at all. While I am a strong believer in “paying it forward” and have lots of hesitations around a term our current President Dipshit made popular, “quid pro quo,” I am not a believer in people who associate with you only when they have something to gain, then immediately forget you exist after. I find it rude, distasteful, and just reeking of selfishness.

Unfortunately, this is quite common in our industry, not just when people are seeking new opportunities, but also within organizations for Internal “favors” done, whether that is beneficial 360 reviews leading up to promotion/raise considerations, adding “thumbs up,” compliments, or AOPs (“air of praises”) to certain individuals on public channels. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. You talk me up to your boss, and I’ll talk you up to yours. This is how the working world works.

Some of these instances are more blatant than others. Let’s look at one recent incident that a friend experienced: she’s currently working at a large, reputable public tech company (let’s call it TechCo) with over 20,000 employees. A former company she used to work at recently had layoffs, resulting in a mutual ex-colleague getting let go – let’s call him Harry. Harry reached out to her on LinkedIn, noting that she worked at TechCo, summarized the layoff story, and asked if she knew if there were any relevant openings that might fit him. She replied back, suggesting he look over their career site and note any job listings that stand out to him, and she’d be happy to refer him.

Harry didn’t respond right away, but while she was procrastinating one day, she took a look herself and noticed a listing that would be an exact match for him. She responded to Harry again, sending him a specific listing and suggesting he look it over. His response? “Wow, thanks! I”ll take a look when I have time, but right now I don’t have time. I’m prepping for an interview.”

Okay. But it gets better. Eventually, Harry replies back to her and says, “Great. I’m going to see how I’m connected to anyone else at TechCo and reach out through those channels.”

So, let’s summarize what just happened here. First, my friend was too kind and actually looked up specific jobs for Harry on TechCo’s career page, and I’ll remind you, in case you aren’t aware, that at large companies, navigating their career listings pages can be a total BEAST and a time suck. Second, Harry’s initial response ignored the fact that my friend was offering to do a favor for him that she did not need to do at all after he initially did outreach to her. Third, Harry, in the end, decided that my friend was not “good enough” to be a company source or referral for him despite the fact that he started this conversation by seeking her help, so he would review his other connections to the company via LinkedIn and try to get a referral through one of THOSE potential channels.

These are the types of people you need to be aware of. And when you properly identify them, avoid them. Run. Far. Hide if you can… Because they are only pests in a world that is running rampant with cockroaches.

One of the many skills that hiring managers look for in tech and pretty much every single job outside of engineering is teamwork/collaboration: how do you work with and share ideas and projects with other people? Are you able to navigate cross-functional teams, build relationships, and work to come to one solution, even when your points of view at the beginning may be starkly different? If you work in any kind of customer-facing role, during your interview process, you will likely get grilled to show examples of how you tread through murky waters with disparate personalities, opposing opinions, and undercurrents of passive aggression on a team or across teams.

A while back, I had to work on a project with someone (he will be called Daniel) who was so anti working with others that when he disagreed with you and did not want to incorporate your idea, he simply said, “Well, let’s see what Jack (pseudonym for our mutual manager) thinks.” End of discussion. No more shared ideas, no compromise. Just bring in Dad to sort this out. Got it.

The project we were working on was a user manual for the technology platform we were supporting. Our team was lean, and thus we had no team members solely focused on educating our customers on how to use the platform they bought via any type of training portal or webinar. This meant countless hours of live trainings and demos, which meant a lot of time (read: money) wasted for the company. We needed to streamline this process and enable customers to first train themselves, then be supplemented with a live, one-time training with someone on our team. The solution? A user manual complete with screen shots and a step-by-step guide of how to use the platform. Daniel was ecstatic; he could finally use his experience as an English teacher in his first job in tech! He spent the next week owning the project, completely leaving me out of it and pretending to work on other tasks when I asked him, until he proudly showcased the 110-page user manual he had come up with (he stole the formatting and style from his previous job’s templates).

I balked when I saw the document — 110 pages? Who is going to use this, much less read even the first few pages? I told him that no customer would take this manual and run with it; everyone is constantly complaining about how little time they have, so what is their incentive to read through a 110-page user manual? He argued, “Well, they bought this platform, so it’s on them to learn it.” Well, here is where his lack of experience in the tech industry truly showed; just because some stakeholder signed a SaaS contract with us did not mean the actual day-to-day users would adopt the product. He did not get this… at all. I tried to explain to him, and he kept going back to, “Well, they bought this, so they should use it.”

“Yes, but 110 pages is not a reasonable ask,” I responded. “It’s WAY too long!”

“It’s mostly just screen shots and pictures,” he fought back. He refused to make it shorter or even consider cutting specific words out of the document which I thought were just plain verbose. He wouldn’t even give me the document so that I could edit it. He was that resistant to even considering a change. Plus, there was no way in hell I was going to create a user manual from scratch if he’d already started work on one.

I went to our mutual manager Jack and told him my point of view. He agreed, saying it should be shorter (Daniel was NOT happy with this), but we could still keep the 110-page version (Daniel was thrilled with this – he wasted endless paper printing out many copies of these and placing them all over the office. For the record, no one ever opened a single copy). So, now I was tasked with taking Daniel’s guide and condensing it. Within a few days, I got it down to just 15 pages – yes, with the screen shots and pictures. We eventually shared this with every new customer who was onboarded. To be frank, there weren’t that many new customers, but hey, I got my point across that 110 pages wasn’t going to fly!

I became a manager pretty early on in my career. While it began as player-coaching, it eventually evolved into at one point, having 5-6 direct reports all having a dotted line to me. I didn’t really think anything of it, as I always imagined at some point, I’d be in a management role and have management responsibilities. I was prepared and poised to lead, and based on feedback and performance reviews, it looked like I did pretty well as a manager. What I was not prepared for was having people report to me who not only were older than me and less experienced in this specific industry, but also being agist and sexist against me.

One of my direct reports (let’s call him Dave) repeatedly gave me a hard time not only because I was a few years younger than him, but because I was his female boss. He frequently made comments about how ridiculous it was that he reported to me despite having more overall work experience than me (I use to clarify and say that while he did, in fact, have more work experience, he did not have more experience in this realm, and thus if he had problems, he could speak to our team lead about this), how I was a feminist (always with a derogatory, negative tone), how he didn’t always have to follow everything I said. And when he didn’t follow what I said, he inevitably made mistakes. Some of them cost the company quite a bit of money, and for that, our team lead (Ogre) would then drag him into a room and verbally ream him. We had multiple layoffs at this company, and during one of them, Dave was actually on the chopping block; HR confirmed this with me. I nearly went hysterical at the idea of Dave getting laid off due to the timing; we were having a huge campaign launch next week, and if Dave got cut, I’d have to take care of this launch all by myself (read: many, many late nights into the wee hours of the morning being spent working on this to ensure success). I pleaded with HR to either hold off on laying him off until after the campaign launch or to choose someone else. Somehow, for once in my career, someone actually listened to me: they chose to lay off someone else and Dave was saved.

Three months later, Dave, constantly flustered by having a younger female boss, got a new job offer and tried to get a counter offer from our company. While the normal thing to do in a situation like this is to tell your direct manager, he instead went over my head and directly to our team lead, telling him that he had another offer, but would stay here if we doubled his salary (the balls to ask for that, really?). Both HR and our team lead declined, and Dave went on his merry way across the fence where the grass was greener. A few months after he left, we hired someone else who was likely four times as competent and quick on her feet. And she never questioned my authority or expertise.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for questioning authority and asking probing questions – in fact, I do this all the time (and have, at many times, paid for it). However, what I am not for is questioning authority merely on the basis of age, gender, or race. Discrimination, much?

Once upon a time, I worked at a tech startup that was headquartered in Silicon Valley. When I started my job, I had no manager. I didn’t know who would approve my paid time off (PTO). I had no onboarding schedule, no one set to train and mentor me given I had zero experience in this industry. I came in at my scheduled time on my first day in the satellite New York office, and they were NOT ready for me. I had no assigned seat and my computer was apparently not scheduled to arrive via Fed Ex for at least a few more hours from our headquarters. People awkwardly looked at me, a few introduced themselves, and that was really it. I asked a colleague what people typically did for lunch; he responded most people went out to buy lunch but would bring it back. After some hesitation, he offered to go out to lunch with me. And now, he’s actually my husband!!

Anyway, it was not a very welcome first day, and it gave me a taste of what I would expect in the coming months. A lot of the work had to be self-learned. A few tried to teach me and guide me in the right direction. The person who was supposed to sign off on my PTO barely even looked at my PTO requests and would just sign off on them. Though she was supposed to be my manager in name, I can count the number of times we actually had a conversation on one hand.

That’s the danger of working at startups that are truly “starting up,” especially if you are an entry-level worker. These types of places define “lack of structure” and “self-teaching,” and depending on your personality, this could be a good or a bad thing. But hey, when people talk about the glamour and glitz of working at a startup, somehow, they forget to mention situations like these.

I once had a team leader who I found to be charming as soon as I met her. She was charismatic, confident, articulate, and clearly came from a well-to-do family in India. She was self-deprecating at times, particularly about being Indian from India with her Indian-accented English, while at other times, she was extremely confident and would have staring contests with individuals she disagreed with. She was certainly a force to be reckoned with, and in many ways, I definitely did reckon with her. She was charming… and manipulative and controlling, and absolutely loved to instill fear in everyone around her.

One thing she loved to do was, well, telling people what to do. She prided herself on never, ever spending the company’s money on anything that did not absolutely have to be spent. So, when it came to things like taking teammates out to lunch, the rare times this did happen, she would spend this money out of pocket instead of expensing it. Her philosophy? “If you are offering to take someone out, you should be true to your word and take them out. Don’t say you will take them out to their face and then expense it. In that case, isn’t it [X company] taking your colleague out and not you?!”

When we had the occasional team outing (our team, depending on the time, ranged from 7-10 people), she or her manager (let’s call him X VP) would spend their own money for bowling or for food and drinks for us. Before and after the event, she would meet with us as a group and give us the same lecture. “You should be grateful that X VP is being so generous to take you all out. I hope you appreciate this gesture. Make sure to remember to thank him and be kind. And don’t do anything ridiculous at the event to embarrass me.” The day after the event, she would send a one-line email: “Please remember to send X VP a thank-you email acknowledging his generosity for taking you out, and let him know you had a good time.”

Well, thanks, Mom, for all the much-needed reminders on good manners and etiquette. We all really needed that, especially since we’re all babies, just between the ages of 22-35!

A former colleague of mine sent me a quick email asking to catch up over the phone sometime soon. He had left the company over a year ago, and he had developed quite the reputation for himself. He rarely came into the office. When we had to travel to San Francisco and Napa for team events or the annual company kick-off, he would make every excuse from “my mom is having a tumor removed” to “my basement flooded during the storm last week, and I need to take care of it.” He frequently stole office supplies when he’d be in the neighborhood on the weekends (our office manager told me this, as she saw the footage on our office cameras installed by both entrances). And when we finally caught up over the phone, he admitted to fake expensing on average about $3K/month for his last nine months at the company. “I milked them for every last cent that I could,” he said, gleefully. He made up business trips to see friends who lived in other states who happened to be located in the same cities where he had customers in his book of business. He wrote in work notes that he was doing “quarterly business reviews” with customers, when in reality, he never went onsite to see the customer for more than a “hi, how are you?” Instead, he took them to expensive, plush restaurants and wined and dined them. Well, those were his “business reviews.”

In the end, he got fired, but in a “nice way”: he was given a few days to say his goodbyes, tell his customers he was leaving. Management wanted to frame it as though it was voluntary to make him feel better. They gave him one month’s severance and even paid health insurance for him and his family for two additional months.

I’ve seen a lot of shady and unethical activity working as a “white-collar” professional, but I truly believe that this guy really took the cake.

A few weeks ago, I had a 1:1 Zoom meeting with our company’s CEO. It was a little strange. The request came out of the blue, as he normally asks my opinion about topics ranging from company morale, New York City office morale, how I think the customer success organization is performing and what could be improved, to where I think he should travel next for vacation. He wanted to ask my opinion on what he could be doing as the company’s leader to create a more diverse and inclusive environment that is ultimately anti-racist.

Our conversation was supposed to be only 30 minutes long, but it ended up going for about 45. We discussed what I’ve read in the How to be an Anti-Racist book, as well as the White Fragility book. He made a verbal commitment to me that he would at least download the White Fragility audio book and listen during his daily exercise. But the part that he seemed to miss the most is that he did not understand the inherent fact that I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog: that it’s impossible to have a conversation about racism and have everyone in the room be comfortable or feel included. The whole idea of discussing “third rail” topics as he likes to call them is to be confronting, unsettling, to spur one into action. He disagreed. “The whole idea of diversity and inclusion is to be inclusive,” he insisted to me. “If we are not being inclusive, then this is not what we want.”

I paused. He still didn’t get it. How could I make him, a wealthy, privileged white man living in one of the most expensive suburbs of Northern California in a $12 million+ mansion, understand the crux of this issue? I elaborated on the background of Robin DiAngelo, the anti-racism educator and author of White Fragility. I told him that she has specialized in researching and educating on this area for nearly three decades. She has workshops every single day with people who seek to be more anti-racist, but fail miserably because they want to speak in generalizations as opposed to zeroing in on their own actions and what they can personally change in their day to day life. To ask someone to change their daily behavior, daily thoughts, is EXTREMELY challenging, if not impossible. And if she, as a 25+ year educator on this topic, still manages to “upset” and “exclude” people due to their white fragility and self implosion when confronting these issues, is the problem really her, the educator, the one prompting these questions, OR, is the issue the people who she’s attempting to reach who refuse to be reached due to their white fragility? When I said this, our CEO’s face suddenly changed. He appeared more contemplative, a bit more empathetic, a little closer to realizing that maybe, just maybe, it’s not the educator’s fault, the one posing the question’s fault, that maybe, the audience who is crying their white tears is actually at fault.

I’m not sure if I really reached him. It may all have been an act on his part. It may have been his way of weaseling himself out of the conversation to seem like he could be bendable, amenable to tangible change. Or maybe, just maybe he actually wanted to see some real change, something really move within our predominantly White company. I will never know for sure. But what I do know for sure is that most CXO teams across organizations around the world now are facing the same issue: they all want to participate in this:

“We at [Brand] are committed to fighting injustice by posting images to Twitter that express our commitment to fighting injustice.

To that end, we offer this solemn white-on-black .jpeg that expresses vague solidarity with the Black community, but will quietly elide the specifics of what is wrong, what needs to change, or in what ways we will do anything about it. This is doubly true if [Brand] is particularly guilty of exacerbating these issues.

We hope this action encourages you to view [Brand] positively without, you know, expecting anything from us.

-[Brand] (credit to Chris Franklin via Twitter)

For us, specifically, our CEO added a blog post to the company website noting that “Black Lives Matter,” that the leadership team would be encouraging employees to donate to these organizations as well. No monetary donation on behalf of the company would be given. No real changes made internally would be communicated via the blog post. It was an empty blog post that, around the same time, was also launched with BLM messaging added as a banner (which links to donating to Color of Change) when customers login to their accounts). At the same time, this organization is also happily taking money from organizations that support the Trump administration (many people in our sector of tech were happy and quick to point out this hypocrisy on LinkedIn posts that went viral). How does this organization reconcile this hypocrisy, if at all? Or do we just continue the BLM messaging on our blog and user platform while at the same time oppressing the lives of people of color?

For the last 12-plus years I’ve been working full time, I’ve worked both in SaaS as well as at digital marketing agencies. Although I’ve had many ups and downs during the course of my full-time working career, I’ve never stopped feeling grateful for all the good fortunes I’ve been privileged to have. I know that I have it better than probably 80-90 percent of the full-time working population given the opportunities I’ve been given, the perks and flexibility I’ve enjoyed, and the travel I’ve been lucky to have done to various parts of this country, not to mention how I’ve been paid. But even within our moments of gratitude, we also need to acknowledge what is right and wrong within our bubbles and identify what needs progress and why. I think that’s something that a lot of people fail to do for various reasons: they are scared to deviate from the status quo and “stir up trouble,” as that may put their own jobs and positions in jeopardy, they don’t want to create controversy, particularly because that disturbs their own comforts they get to enjoy, and well, they’re just lazy and don’t want to do anything that will require any proactivity on their part. It could also be a combination of all the above.

During my time working in the agency world, I realized how easy it was to get too comfortable with everything from the status quo, mediocrity, substituting activity for achievement (oh, this one is a HUGE theme across work in general and is not just about the agency world, though given that agencies make their money based on a percentage of spend from brands, this plays quite prominently here), and just doing your day to day, literally paper pushing.

But what has also happened is that a friend of mine who has remained in the agency world (and is still at the same agency I left) has repeatedly told me how toxic and awful the tech industry is once I rejoined it in 2013 because of the rampant politics, sexism, and racism that has gotten the spotlight due to reports from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the like. He’s insinuated to me that he doesn’t think I should work in tech anymore and that my desire and decision to leave was misguided. My general feeling about this is that it is true that the tech industry is not perfect; it is part of the working world, isn’t it, just a specific sector, so it will never be immune from the issues that our society or world faces. Yes, the tech industry wears a mask of being more progressive, promoting diversity and inclusion efforts internally, and taking care of its employees more than the average (read: crappy, cut-throat, bare-bones) American company through its offerings of attractive perks that range from “unlimited PTO” (I will deconstruct this myth/recruiter selling tactic in a later post), free snacks, daily lunches, reimbursement of all commuter costs, 100% employer-covered medical/dental/vision premiums, fitness/gym/massage reimbursements, to even fertility and egg freezing benefits, but because they do actually go above and beyond with these types of perks on average vs. other industries, that is enough to make someone want to jump over from another industry into tech. Why? Because the relationship you have with your employer is transactional, as I learned pretty much the very first time I got laid off in 2009. You offer your expertise and services to your employer in exchange for a salary and whatever benefits they are willing to offer. There is nothing more to this relationship, so you should not think anything more of it… because we know, for sure, they certainly will not. They will not hesitate to cut you when they no longer think they need you (whether that’s because you actually are under performing or, in most cases, because certain key people may not like you. Hello, politics). Because of this cold, blunt fact, why should we, as potential employees, not want to take advantage of every potential benefit and perk an employer is willing to give us and milk it for as much and as long as possible? We’re only maximizing our own gains, and if we do not think of ourselves first, it is guaranteed that no one else ever will — and certainly not your employer – past, current, or future. Therefore, with that said, this is why I strongly believe that unless you are working for yourself and can call all the shots, the best industry to be working in to maximize the “you” benefit is in tech. Just don’t work at one of those loser, backwards tech companies that offers zero of the attractive benefits noted above — otherwise, why are you even working in tech?! Do you think you are going to change the world? Don’t be that naive and take care of yourself — knowing that no one else will.