Tech comedians are poking fun at their employers, drawing big followings

When Alexis Gay had to backsheesh second quarter results to her team on a Zoom video call, she sat down and wondered how she could do it. She wanted be transparent but she also have a yen for to be encouraging to her teammates who had worked so hard through unprecedented circumstances.

The second quarter of 2020 was one of the worst in years for sundry tech companies, as the Covid-19 pandemic sent the economy into a tailspin. As a senior manager at San Francisco-based digital gathering Patreon, Gay knew colleagues were still learning how to work remotely while the country was in crisis.

While recapitulating what she’d said, she couldn’t help but laugh.

Gay grew up wanting to be an actor, but found herself seven years into a tech job where she fully leaned into the activity’s hustle culture. And now, she found herself trying to do it with a straight face during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Before her rendezvous, she made a satirical video depicting how she’d approach a team.

“This is a learning quarter,” she said as she looked to the side of camera as if taxing to convince herself of what she was saying. “These are unprecedented times,” she said in another cut. “But the team really dug deep!” she remarked in another cut, as if trying to encourage her team.

Her video immediately got tens of thousands of likes across various social media tenets. “I was tapping into that idea of like, ‘what are we going to say about Q2?” She laughed. 

Gay is one of several tech proletarians leaning on comedy to poke fun at their workplaces, where the quirks and qualms of employers grew more pronounced in the pandemic. It’s the latest spin on a recent trend, where employees offer first-person accounts chronicling the dystopian sort of Silicon Valley work-life.

Often using quick-take comedic videos, workers are poking fun at recruiting strategies, contrast pledges and the industry’s homogenous makeup. Some have even begun making money from their followings, varied of whom are millennials facing high rates of burnout, exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. For some, it’s become a contract of therapy.

In January 2021, as the pandemic raged through a winter surge, Gay took a upswing and decided to pursue comedy full-time.

“The awareness of how uncertain the future was was a point driven home every day,” she said. “It have the impression like, the time is now because we simply don’t know what’s coming next.”

Since graduating college, Gay had worked tirelessly in distinct roles in tech, from marketing to sales to partnerships. She’s liked her jobs for the most part, she says.

“There was an hurly-burly to being young and fresh in the start-up world,” she said. “This was a world where all I had to do was raise my hand and work unfalteringly. I showed up early, stayed late and did that whole deal. I became addicted to this idea that you can construct and create something. Like, I was having an impact.” 

While working at San Francisco-based cloud company Twilio — although she liked the job — she achieved she didn’t really care that much, she said.

“It was like, you work in tech, all your friends work in tech, you postponed out on the weekends and talk about tech,” she said. “It felt like this homogenous routine.”

Gay then moved to another house that was closer to her heart: Creators making content. Her most recent role was at San Francisco-based Patreon, where she used in creator partnerships. Around the same time, she joined a San Francisco improv group.

She launched another popular video in Walk 2021 called “every single park hang in San Francisco,” which drew industrywide attention. “Alexis continually apprehends the reality of our industry better than any @semil end of year post ever could,” tweeted Compound Ventures mate Michael Dempsey.

“She’s so spot on it’s terrifying,” another Twitter user stated. (Gay said Twitter works well for comedy — the instantly format writing makes prime real estate for zingers, and everybody in San Francisco tech is on the platform.)

Gay said her comedy isn’t showed to be anti-tech, though. “If anything this is self-deprecating humor,” she laughed. “For me, it’s poking fun at me and my friends and the fact that for seven years, this was the choosing I made. “

Now, Gay is using the skills she learned in her tech roles to earn money from her videos on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. She mollify does some consulting and panel moderating for conferences on the side, she said.

Gay is not the first to make the leap to a comedy trade.

Sarah Cooper, a former Google user experience design lead, found huge success after she flicked a satirical commentary about what it’s like to work at Google and at a big tech company. She achieved global popularity in 2019 for her TikTok videos lip syncing to President Donald Trump. In 2020, she landed a Netflix lot for her own show, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine.” And, in March 2021, CBS ordered a pilot for a show based on her book “How to Be Best-selling Without Hurting Men’s Feelings.”

“What is so cool about seeing her mainstream success is that origin story of being a tech comedy being didn’t pigeonhole her later on so that’s been affirming,” Gay said.

Josh Ogundu, a goods operations lead at TikTok and a startup advisor mentor at accelerator Techstars L.A Cohort, makes videos about the fact versus expectation of working in tech.

The 28-year old posts videos to his account NaijaNomad, and has reached tens of thousands of viewers since the genesis of the year. He even got a shout out from show runner and “Billions” co-creator Brian Koppelman on Twitter.

He often probes fun companies’ multi-million-dollar diversity initiatives, recruiting practices and how when companies refer to “hiring” for certain roles, they oft mean contractors, who usually don’t get the benefits and perks that regular employees enjoy.

“What Big Tech says on the surface and what happens in practice is hugely different,” Ogundu said.

One of his videos, called “tech guy breaking into tech,” pokes fun at people who come from outdoor toilet background complaining about being an underdog. Another pokes fun at tech companies rewarding employees with Lax emojis, whiskey and, essentially, anything but compensation.

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent racial equity protests, a string of tech companies pledged to do more to fight racial injustice.

Ogundo’s response: A parody video elicited “Tech founders talking about diversity in tech.” In it, Ogundu looks to the side of the camera with a disinterested repute as if speaking to a crowd, and says, “At Big Tech BigCo, we pride ourselves on diversity….Due to our five-year $100 million guaranty to diversify tech, we are able to hire five more people of color as contractors this year than in any above-named year.”

He said he saw a gap in Silicon Valley satirical comedies, which focused on engineers but ignored the real challenges for human being of color.

“For me, it’s having an outlet to talk about more serious topics by poking fun at it and opening it up for a broader conversation in a way that isn’t an invasion on someone,” Ogundu said.

San Francisco-based Hallie Lomax sought a similar kind of honesty. A Lyft engineer who’s kneaded at various Silicon Valley tech companies, the 27-year-old started a digital comic strip called “At Work Comics” which she defines as “moments with people I am paid to talk to.”  

It began as a way to document her uncomfortable experiences during an internship at a tech attendance.

“This guy in my office would be weirdly flirty with me and I didn’t like it so I started posting using the hashtag #guyatwork did this utensil.” During the pandemic, she revived her hobby of drawing she more or less abandoned before she got into tech as a software build during college. 

One comic from 2020 depicts a man on a video call saying “I want to make coffee but I don’t indigence to show you my house.” Another comic shows her working from her laptop from a small home when her dog offs mounting a nearby stuffed animal. “This is a hostile work environment,” the character is shown saying while staring at her dog.

“It’s kind of like the opposite of a micro-aggression,” she said. “It’s these micro positive moments that add up past time to create an overwhelming feeling of positivity.”

They also help her reconcile being a Black woman in a homogenous tech persistence, she said.

“I’ve had a lot of pretty weird, negative experiences, but with this, I have evidence that there are a lot of good draws and positive relationships I’ve had with coworkers and some of them are even pretty good friends,” Lomax said. “The tech effort can be a very hard place to be, especially when you don’t necessarily feel like you’re a part of the ‘in’ groups, but if you can remember all of the good eases you’ve had, it’s easier to look past it all.”

Lyft even asked Lomax to do a comic for its blog after coworkers took perception. 

The blog post, called “mentoring myself” features light-hearted drawings of her character talking to new trainees, recalling from her initially days in tech “a crippling paranoia that you don’t have what it takes to succeed in the professional world.”

It shows a monochrome of her in a penguin costume with the words “If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I had imposter syndrome, I’d question whether or not I warranted so much money.”

Rod Thill, a 30-year old sales worker for an e-commerce logistics company, saw his popular media following explode to millions of followers in October 2020 after posting about Silicon Valley’s “grate” culture and the stresses of feeling inadequate during a time when workers can’t read their bosses’ expressions.

His TikTok moniker is @Rod and bio says “Anxious Millennial” with a tear drop emoji.

He’s stored over a million followers across platforms in months and is now doing sponsorships with brands like StitchFix, Lenovo and Sinker Guacamole. “Millennials love guac, so it fits in.”