Gone are the days of whispering salaries among friends or hunting for compensation expectations on Glassdoor while looking for a new job. These days, employees in the tech world rely on an anonymous online forum called Blind to dish all of their insider intel on pay, stock options, workplace culture, managers, and what snacks line the kitchen shelves.
The South Korean app launched in 2015 and has grown rapidly. The Reddit-like forums now span topics well beyond professional — from dating woes to politics. In these conversations, you can truly find everything that’s good and bad and worse about Silicon Valley.
I first scrolled Blind a couple of years ago when my friends told me that it had honest compensation and work culture information. It provided transparency that hadn’t been around in the past, and I used it to screen startups that reached out to me.I cared less about whether they were funded by Andreessen Horowitz and more whether they had a functioning CEO that wasn’t a delusional manchild.In the past, you’d have to ask around and risk it. With Blind, I had more security.
Essentially, Blind provides a service similar to Glassdoor, but with more anonymity and freedom. You can input your compensation and view how you compare to your peers, as well as context from employees that adds a level of granularity nearly impossible to find elsewhere. For example, if you’re interviewing for an Amazon L6 software engineer position, you can see where you want to land on the spectrum of L6 salaries, as well as the best and worst teams to be placed on.
In some ways, this kind of transparency seems to even the playing field by making total compensation transparent and warning new potential hires about bad teams, managers, or companies. Before choosing which companies to apply to, I will assiduously read the company’s Blind reviews and scroll through posts about the culture.
During the Covid-19 layoffs in 2020, Blind became an early warning signal to tech employees on what might be going down and how it could affect them. Rumors and tip-offs would hit the site before they popped up in the media. It also served as a place where people could request or give referrals. Users shared which companies were still hiring and discussed everything from work visa documents to complications with health insurance.
Regardless of how somebody may use Blind — if you post, if you lurk, if you just vote in the polls — the information is often valuable for deciphering the subculture of technology and pushing you to reach certain goals.
However, Blind has the same seedy underbelly that eventually brought down other anonymous forums like Yik Yak. The focus on compensation encourages a rat race mentality and the male-dominated discourse borders on r/TheRedPill.
Dating in Silicon Valley is a hot topic and official tag on Blind. Noticeably, posts about relationships, which have nothing to do with careers, tend to have the user’s total compensation (TC) listed at the bottom and if not, there will be constant requests in the comment section for “TC or GTFO” (total compensation or get the fuck out). This demonstrates how critical salary is to how people are viewed by the Blind community. Those who have a high TC are revered; those with a lower salary need to make a change, stat.
The ego of the high earners is also on full display, reflecting the dating culture many complain of in the Bay Area.
Silicon Valley men often lament about scarce dating prospects in the Bay Area and the technology sector overall.
Overall, the lack of moderators allow comments with sexist and racist undertones to appear. For example, a post titled, “What if you found your GF has one-night stand before meet you?” has comments such as: “It does lessen your value in the dating market.”
Similarly, upsetting posts about Black Lives Matter appeared over the summer.
Despite the negative facets of Blind, it provides insight and transparency into jobs that you might not have unless you happen to be in the right network. It’s personally pushed me to demand a salary higher than I would have originally negotiated for.
In many ways, it’s also exposed me to the best and worst of tech culture. It’s a place where people share optimism about technology’s ability to change the world, those who only value prestige and compensation, and those who harbor racist and sexist views.
In the past few months, Blind has tried to expand to other high-earning professions outside of technology, such as finance and consulting. It’s not clear how successful it’s been.The future of Blind, like the future of any social platform, depends on who they attract, how they attract them, and how they moderate the discussion to keep people there. The future could look more like Reddit, where there is clear moderation and terms of service, or 4chan, a place where hateful rhetoric and misinformation thrives. Blind will need to decide what it becomes.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
