"Back Row" Employees
Building a resilient workforce ignored by Big Tech - A postcard from the future
A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.
// With Big Tech companies competing over the same workforce, how will that impact tech recruiting in the 2020s?
// 2030 - Fortune Leaders interview
“You have built a loyal, productive, and very profitable company in the past decade, during a period of major turmoil in the United States. How did you do it?
“I knew when I started the company that the US was in for a crazy rollercoaster, so I wanted resilience. I wanted folks who could be long-term employees, had some connection with their local community, and who tech wouldn’t even look at because they had no ‘merit signals’.
“We don’t have an educational system that works. Our public schools are rotting. Did you know that in large parts of the US, teachers can’t give a student a ‘zero’, even if they didn’t do a darn thing? Thanks to the pandemic and school shootings, over half of K-12 teachers left the profession between 2020 and 2025.
“Some folks luck out into having parents or community rooting for them. Pushed onto the meritocracy treadmill - they get good grades, get tutoring, get into the right colleges, get the right internships, and ‘earn’ that upper class lifestyle. These are ‘Front Row’ students.
“The kids who didn’t luck into having motivating parents or communities, they become ‘Back Row’ students. Disinterested in school. And every single metric that big companies look at to hire means they won’t make that particular cut. Simple market analysis: a giant cohort of talent that the Front Row system not only didn’t know how to value, but actively didn’t want to. They are who I sought out.
“My vetting was two-fold: person and place.
For the person:
An online persona demonstrating the ability to work with others; I started with active Fortnite clan and Discord friends
Not too much involvement with crypto pump and dump schemes
At least two credible teachers or community leaders willing to vouch for them
For the place they live:
Recently gutted by hedge funds or other ‘value extractors’, so they’ve got a chip on their shoulder and something to prove
At least one church or a local social institution still going
Not touched by a ‘tech bootcamp scam’
Low risk of climate change flooding
“This combination took a ton of effort, as I couldn’t just outsource it to typical recruiting houses for farming LinkedIn resumes. It paid off when internal American climate change refugees reshaped the US in the second half of the 2020s, as my team’s deep roots in their local community combined with their ability to find community online enabled them, and us, to thrive. And that’s good for business.