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{Isolation Tales} The House Of Bones By Silvia Brown, Miranda Crites, Fiona Dodwell & Michelle Enelen.
27th March 2020 Gavin Kendall Reviews Feature 0
These are the most testing times the human race have faced since World War II. This time the enemy is unseen, an enemy so powerful it's forcing many of us to retreat back into our houses. It's here that people will try to continue to live as normal a life as they can and it's here that the wonderful art of storytelling may blossom. Be it, young children sitting in front of a parent, or a person sadly on their own listening to the radio, stories will be spread and remembered, to be told to future generations once this horrible virus has faded.
I wanted to be able to share some stories with the fiends of Kendall Reviews, stories to help people get through these difficult times.
I'm incredibly proud of the talented people that contribute to Kendall Reviews. Four members of Team KR have worked together to bring you a chilling Isolation Tale.
So, sit back and let Miranda, Fiona, Michelle and Silvia tell you a story.
The House Of Bones
Silvia Brown, Miranda Crites, Fiona Dodwell, Michelle Enelen
The wind had picked up to a nearly howling speed. Sleet pelted against the windows, waking Sombra in her sleeping bag on the dusty hardwood floor. Reaching for her phone to see what time it was, she quickly remembered where she was when her arm protested with pins and needles. Her entire body ached.
Once blood flow was restored to her tingling limb, she picked up her phone and saw it was slightly after 5:00 a.m. She had finally fallen asleep only a couple hours before.
"Enough of this," she mumbled to herself and got up to turn on her battery-powered lantern.
Sombra had signed the final paperwork for the house only the day before. It felt good to hold the keys in her hand, to actually own her home. She couldn't stop smiling. She had stopped to pick up some supplies from a sporting goods store and then at a grocery store for some non-perishables before filling up her Tahoe's gas tank and heading out on the three-hour journey to her new home for the very first time.
She'd bought the house sight unseen. The few online photos showed an old, sad-looking, white house with a wraparound porch. It was supposed to be in decent shape, meaning the roof didn't leak and the foundation was sound. The steps needed replacing, and it required painting inside and out. The house had previously caught fire in the kitchen and had been boarded up afterwards. It would definitely need all new appliances, and the exterior wall would need to be properly repaired, but the two biggest concerns were the plumbing and wiring. When Sombra had called Elk River Power to see about getting the electric turned on before her arrival, Robert Gulf, the man who had answered, nearly laughed at her. After telling Mr. Gulf she had purchased the house, he opened up and told her a little about the house's history.
"Do you know how long it will be until I can get an electrician to inspect it, then?" she had asked.
"Well, Miss, it's a little more complicated than that," Robert had begun. "There was a small kitchen fire when it was still in the Town's hands – it used to be a halfway house before they got the new building. They were in the process of moving when it happened, and the repairs were overlooked. Not long after it caught fire, scavengers made their way in through the hole in the kitchen wall. Some were homeless and stayed there awhile. Then, they started to rip out the wiring and copper plumbing to sell for dope money. Toby from over at the recycling place is the Sheriff's brother-in-law, and they were talking one evening and put two and two together. Sheriff Crates went over to check out the house later that week, and sure enough, Toby had been right. Wally, that's the sheriff, arrested the squatters, and had a couple guys from the Town of Barton to get some materials and seal the hole. But the damage was done, Miss, and it'll take a good chunk of change and some time to get it all back up to code, I'm afraid."
That had been disappointing, but Sombra was determined to make this work. She thought it would be a little like camping, and it had been too long since she'd been on a camping trip.
It was early, but she decided to get the day started. She lit her small camp stove, poured some bottled water into her kettle, and dug through one of the boxes she'd brought inside yesterday evening in search of her instant coffee and powdered creamer.
She didn't notice the tall figure standing in the shadows.
He watched her doctor up the instant penance, that's what the shrink used to call it, his state-appointed doc was an iced Caffe Mocha Trenta sort and snorted his dislike for the cheap coffee supplied by NAMI. Penance he'd moan I'm doing my share by helping these fortunates. I shouldn't have to be tortured too! Nobody knew he was taking his pound of flesh from everyone he "helped". Nobody except the patients and who would believe them? These thoughts were provoked by the smell of her coffee. Cheap or not, he wished he could taste it. He'd drink it right out of her mouth. Best to keep hidden for now. Something he was good at, that's how he'd found out she was now the owner of his home.
She drank it down hot and kept the kettle going knowing she'd need the jolt to get through today. The electrician hadn't exaggerated. She'd be living this camp lifestyle into fall, hopefully not longer. She was determined, but not foolish enough to think she'd stay through winter with no heat. At least it was the tail-end of freezing season. Though she wished she'd checked out the place first-hand, it still held charm. The best part was no-one knew where she was, and no-one here knew who she was. Starting over in a house of bones; luckily, they were good bones. The structure was intact. The strays had begun taking out the copper using whatever they could find, junkies weren't known for keeping adequate tool bags together. The framing had survived their pilfering. Right now, that was her strength, she decided to tackle the main floor and work her way up. Worrying about the cellar would be a long way off unless she heard too many scrabbling feet. She said as much to the darkness as she peered down the stairs.
Don't worry about that he thought, still watching her, everything down there is dead.
She went outside to relieve herself of that first cup of coffee; he took a swig of the lukewarm dregs then stole upstairs knowing he could watch her from sporadic holes in the flooring. It had been a drifter's haven for some time now, the authorities would likely wash their hands of this place now that it had an owner. He didn't want to leave this place, nowhere else to go. They'd questioned him once about the missing psychiatrist, but the man had so many clients, both state-assigned and the moneyed honey's that paid his bills. The theory was that a cuckold husband had finally realized he wasn't the only one supporting a lover and had found a way to take the problem out of the equation. A quiet man hears a lot.
Sombra stretched, watching the sun through the grimy glass, she'd venture outside today only when necessary. It was going to be a cold one. She'd start by cleaning out all the trash. When Robert mentioned drugs and squatters, she'd gotten herself a pair of thick leather gloves to layer with the long rubber ones. Better to be prepared for needles and broken bottles, tough or not she loathed being stabbed by doctors and wanted to avoid the tetanus shot. In her opinion doctors had too much in common with willful teenagers, their handwriting was chicken-scratch, and their descriptions were less than honest. A little pinch, a little sting would mean whatever they were doing was gonna hurt like Hell.
Soon she'd need to venture out for more fuel. The batteries she'd brought would be sucked up too soon and experience had taught her that such necessities were always more expensive the further from the city you went. Thinking ahead, she'd sunk a little money into a gas generator, but traveling light (everything she now owned) hadn't left room for extra fuel. The closest town, Barton was still forty-five minutes away, she hadn't slept well enough to feel safe driving through the frigid howler and didn't trust herself not to slip up if someone asked where she was from. She'd get used to it though, she'd better. And fast. For now, concentrate on cleaning while wishing she had some music to get her through. Maybe tomorrow. For now, she'd whistle or sing whatever it was those fairy tales claimed got you through the work. Maybe it was a spoonful of sugar? Well, she still had a couple mason jars of Kilju stashed and that definitely counted as sugar. After she picked up her fuel she'd celebrate with a few nips, it might even help her get a little more sleep tonight.
He watched her through the morning, first with disdain (she was taking his home!) then with curiosity and a growing admiration. She was stronger and more determined than any other woman he'd known. Too bad the doctor hadn't met up with her! She may have been able to save some of his patients from the brutality of his "experiments". The screaming would never leave his mind. They were a long way out from anything resembling a town – exactly what the doctor had wanted. Since they were voluntary patients on the state's dime, no-one really cared when they dropped off the sign-in sheets. No one paid attention to the trips he took them on or checked for their return. In fact, no one really paid attention to much of anything the doctor did. That's how he got away with it so often. The quiet man towered above him, making an imposing target. He liked them easy, so he hadn't even tried, but he had taken liberties with people the tall man considered friends. It took a while to track the doctor, when he finally found the house in the woods, he didn't know what to do. There was no turning the bastard in. A man of good standing, a community leader especially one that charitably gives his time and expertise to the indigent must be a saint. The tall man was nobody. A drifter with a different story for each person that questioned him. A ward of the state since childhood was all anyone knew for certain. Too tall, too quiet, and stared too intensely for anyone's comfort. They left him alone. That was how he came to call this place home. He and the house were invisible to most people. He liked that just fine. Could've stayed that way too. Even the squatters had left him alone, but now a woman had moved herself into his sanctuary. He didn't want to hurt her, but he had no other place to go. Not one to rush, he decided to watch her for a season. According to her and the condition of the house, he had time.
Sombra shifted uneasily beneath her sleeping bag, the coldness of the house seeping over her skin. She shivered. It was late – probably after 2 a.m. now – and she'd been trying to sleep since she'd crawled into her makeshift bedroom a few hours earlier. Had this whole thing been an incredible mistake after all? Could she really imagine herself camping in an empty, old, and freezing cold building for several more weeks like this? At first she had felt attracted to the idea (excited, even) – not least because it served as an escape from her life (and relationships) where everything had become such an awful, nightmarish mess – but also because there was something so alluring to the idea of starting over. A new chapter. People often, at least it seemed to her, acted as if the life they were in was unchangeable. What crap that was. Nothing was too late until the end, that's the truth that Sombra held onto.
As she lay there, twisting herself inside the sleeping bag, she winced. Her whole body ached, especially her back and upper arms. She'd spent the day sorting through some of the heavy boxes she'd brought with her, unpacking messily as she went along, and she'd begun organising the few bits of furniture she'd managed to fit in her vehicle. She'd made a start on cleaning some of the dusty, grimy rooms and had even started to clear some of the junk and overgrown mess in the garden to the rear of the property. After a few hours on those jobs, a lengthy trip into town to collect more fuel, she had decided to call it a day. Those were the types of tasks she could get on with without electricity – it wasn't much, but it had kept her busy, at least, in the yawning silence of the sprawling property. Now, though, she ached, and the cold was stopping her from getting some much-needed rest.
Sombra sighed heavily. She turned from her side and onto her back, then opened her eyes. The dark room around her was a patchwork of indiscernible shadows and shapes. She peered over to the window that faced in and she inwardly shrank inside of herself: she hated that she hadn't been able to put up a curtain there yet. It felt to her as if she was being watched, even though there was nothing there. It made her feel exposed, somehow, like easy prey to whatever might lurk out there in the night.
Pulling her eyes away from the exposed window, she yawned and sat up, shuffling her slim frame from out of the confines of the sleeping bag. She was giving up on sleep – for now. She slipped out of it, standing up slowly, and then pulled on her heavy, black jumper that she had left lying on the dusty floor beside her. She yanked it on, over the thick, winter pajamas she was wearing, and then just as she was about to reach for her flask, she heard a noise.
A movement. Like somebody had taken a step inside the house.
Sombra froze. Every inch of her body instantly felt taut.
What the hell? she thought to herself. Could it just be an animal that had gotten in from her jungle-mess of a yard out there? What kinds of animals were in this kind of landscape, she wondered?
Before she could even think anything further, another noise. The tiniest squeak, a slight movement – barely audible, but certainly there. Any movement was easy to capture in the silence of the house. Something moved inside the house with her. It sounded close. Too close.
Sombra looked around for something to grab; she wanted to feel like she had something to protect herself with, but it was too dark. Far too dark to even see where she'd left the tools. She needed to put her torch on to find where she'd left them… If there was anybody around, that would alert them to exactly where she was – was putting the light on a bad idea?
She inhaled deeply. Shit. This had to be her mind working overtime. No one was around this place for miles. Nobody. That's why she chose it! It had to be some kind of animal. She was letting her imagination get the better of her…it wasn't like her at all. Perhaps it was the isolation of the place twisting her into believing things that were surely not possible?
Thump. Creak. Shuffle.
Sombra let out an involuntary yelp and stepped back from the open doorway of the room she was standing in. She narrowed her eyes, staring at the wide door frame, her hands tightened into fists. She tried to see if there was any movement, but it was so dark, she could barely see her hands in front of her face. Damn it, I need my torch! Her face contorted in fear, Sombra did the only thing she knew how to: sound strong. Pretend you're strong. Fake it til you make it.
"Is there somebody out there? Is somebody messing with me because I will call the fucking cops if -" Her voice fell to silence as a small figure stepped into view in the open doorway. It was hard to see in any detail, but Sombra could just about tell that it was a petite female form, a girl with long hair, wearing something long and white. A nightgown?
"I knew it!" she said, the girl's voice sounding excited. "I knew our house was haunted!"
Sombra recoiled, taking a step back. Even though the place had felt cold to her before, there was now an unnatural chill in the air. "What the hell – what – who the hell are you?"
The girl took a slow step toward Sombra. "It's okay," she said softly. "I knew when mum and dad bought this house that there was something to it… some kind of weird energy… I mean, I knew the stories, obviously… about the fact that this place used to be a half-way house, and a couple of years ago, a young woman moved in here to try to escape her past or whatever… and anyway, she was killed by some kind of mad guy who was spying on her from inside the house… I mean, I knew this place had some energy. I knew you were stuck here. I was waiting for the chance to help you."
Sombra cleared her throat and laughed. It was a humorless, dry laugh. "I don't know who the hell you are, or why you are standing in my house in the middle of the night, but you need to get out right now, or I will -" Sombra swallowed and fell quiet.
Despite the fact that the young girl had sounded insane, something about what she said prickled at her memories. How long had she been in the house, exactly? One day? Two days? Two years? What was that about a guy hiding in the house, spying on her? A chill enveloped Sombra and she stood still, a deep fear invading her very being.
"It's okay," the young girl said. "Most people who die a violent death get trapped and keep living the same thing over and over. You keep waking up, and you think you have to do this house up. The house doesn't look like that anymore, it's just you can only see it through your own memories…I can help you move on. Nanna said I have a gift for it."
"I – wait… I don't understand…." Sombra didn't even recognise her own voice.
"A man watched you from the shadows when you moved in all that time ago, and after a while, he gave in to his urges. He was a murderer – he killed people. He tried to resist his instinct, but he was insane. He killed you one night whilst you were resting in your sleeping bag. I'm sorry. You've been waking up in this house every day since, still believing you've just moved in. But it's my house now, my family lives here"
Sombra opened her mouth wide, a terrible scream escaped it.
Sombra's scream echoed throughout the old building, causing the witnesses to her realisation to take a step back. Their fear pulsing ahead of her as the vibration in her throat tore through her self-imposed veil of ignorance. Repressed memories flooding back to her mind while she froze unable to cope with the details she had fought to erase.
The clammy feeling of hands on her neck, the reek of breath, too close to bear. Yet there was something else. Perfume. A whiff of a familiar fragrance, soft hands, and the sharpness of manicured nails on her skin.
"Wrooooooong," Sombra screamed through gritted teeth. Kicking as hard as she could, pushing her attacker away. Every movement played as if orchestrated by a higher hand, her knowing her fate didn't deter her from trying to survive.
"Nana, what does she mean by 'wrong'?" a soft voice asked in the distance and Sombra turned towards it in time to see the frowning face looking down on the young girl. Under years of wrinkled skin and bones, the same features stared back at Sombra, and she understood. The reason why she couldn't stop coming back, reliving her tragedy over and over. She got it all wrong. They all had. A tale as old as time, a man taking on a woman, repeated over time, an abominable cliche becoming the unbeatable truth. One that Sombra's mind clung onto. Until now.
"Youuuu!," with the last of her strength, Sombra threw herself at the old crone, as the shadow of her attacker followed her suit and did the deed, ending her life once again. Only this time, her blood had not been spilled in vain. Before her ethereal body disintegrated, Sombra found closure in the form of her reflection in the dead woman's eyes. Looming over the crone's dead body, Sombra ascended towards the light and finally let herself go. Her spirit finding peace once and for all.
Silvia Brown
Silvia Brown is a Spanish-born Australian horror writer and poet. Silvia lived and worked in Ireland, Canada, The Netherlands, (and Melbourne) before moving to Canberra to focus on her writing.
Her current projects include a poetry collection, a couple of short story commissions and a literary translation.
Silvia enjoys long naps with her bulldog Patch and attending writing conventions.
You can find out more about Silvia by visiting her official website www.silviabrown.wixsite.com
You can follow Silvia on Twitter @SilvBrownWriter
Miranda Crites
Miranda Crites is a reader, writer, book reviewer, photographer, and lover of horror from the ghostly woods of rural West Virginia.
The writing bug bit Miranda at a very early age. She was pretty much born with a pen and a camera in her hands. She won the young writers' contest in first grade and received her first camera as a gift when she was nine years old.
When not writing, Miranda enjoys spending time with her family. She and her family spend a lot of time off the grid where they are building a cabin in the supposedly haunted woods.
Miranda is self-employed. She and her husband create large and small vinyl decals, t-shirts, signs, and a plethora of creative customized items.
Some of her many hobbies when time allows are: making unique crafts and artwork, painting, hiking, and, of course, photography.
She has a diploma for Writing for Children and Teenagers although most of her current work is horror fiction and poetry.
Miranda is a member of Team Kendall Reviews at www.KendallReviews.com where you can find her horror book reviews and her monthly feature, Miranda Snaps, which generally contains horror fiction and photography.
Miranda is one of "The Thirty," which is a group of thirty authors who are each taking a turn in writing a chapter of an in-progress horror novel.
You can follow Miranda on Instagram Miranda_C_rites
Follow Miranda on Twitter @Miranda_C_rites
You can find out more about Miranda via her website www.mirandacritesreadsandwrites.com
Fiona Dodwell
Fiona Dodwell is a horror fanatic who has been obsessed with the genre since she was a teenager. She has had several horror titles published, including Nails, Juniper's Shadow, The Banishing and The Given. She also writes freelance for various websites and magazines, including Music News, Made In Shoreditch and Tremr.
Her new horror book, The Risen, will be released late 2020 with publishing company Arcanum Press. To find out more about Fiona and her work, you can follow her on Twitter at: @Angel_devil982
Michelle Enelen
Raised by Pentecostal preachers, horror was not a readily available commodity. As her love grew, her parents were occasionally summoned to school to talk about book reports and various projects that weren't quite appropriate for her age. They were lost as to where she'd gotten such "trash". Luckily for her, there was a librarian that understood her insatiable hunger for darker worlds. Even now, if she could, she'd live among the stacks.
Her penchant grew to include ghastly movies and music, which she'll happily share with anyone listening. The love of horror continues with her favorite videogame, "House of the Dead, Overkill". She's not the best gamer, except when defending herself against the wrong monsters. Head shots are her speciality.
Twitter @falln468
Isolation Tales
Team KR
{Feature} David Sodergren (The Forgotten Island, Night Shoot, Dead Girl Blues) offers Fifty horror films on Amazon Prime to get you through the lockdown.
{The Graveyard Shift} Mark Anthony Smith is this week's warden.
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Strategent FinancialAdvising your future
FourSIGHT Alliance
Warren Buffet Invests Like a Girl: And Why You Should Too
By Dale S. Lam, CPA / PFS, CFP®
April, 2014, Excerpt from Strategent Financial Wealth Management Outlook 2014
Why invest like a girl? Because females generally possess traits that make them better at investing than their male counterparts. Author LouAnn Lofton, who penned the catchy title above for one of her books, notes that for men, stock picking is often about one-upmanship and bragging. Lofton's reference to Warren Buffet is a headline catcher given that Buffet, age 83, is generally regarded as one of the world's most successful investors, with a net worth approaching $60 billion.
"With men, too often investing is all about keeping score. It's a macho thing," Lofton says. "They're looking for hot stock tips to get the quick win and then talk about it." Additionally, men hold onto their losers a lot longer than women. They're sure the stock will come roaring back – even as it sinks.
The study of how and why people make financial decisions is called behavioral economics and much research in this area helps explain our actions, which are often irrational, and our performance. Legitimate marketers, con artists and stockbrokers make lots of money off our irrational behavior. And a load of research in behavioral economics suggests that a man's portfolio and pocketbook would be a lot better off if they listened more to women.
Terry Odean, a University of California professor, has studied stock picking by gender for more than two decades. A seven-year study found single female investors outperformed single men by 2.3 percent, female investment groups outperformed male counterparts by 4.6 percent and women overall outperformed by 1.4 percent. Why? The short answer is overconfidence. Men trade more, and the more you trade, typically the more you lose – not to mention running up transaction costs.
"In our research, male investors traded 45 percent more than female investors. Men are just making a lot more bad decisions than women. More trading leads to lower performance."
Terry Odean, University of California
Bad financial decisions often can be traced back to unwarranted optimism, or the "positivity illusion" that things are going to turn out just right. On paper it sounds good – better to be hopeful, right? Not so fast. This tendency clouds critical thinking.
Con artists love men, particularly well-educated, optimistic, overconfident ones who think they're too smart to be taken. These guys are the easiest mark for the crook, according to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation. Gerri Walsh, its president, is an expert on investment fraud and behavior.
"Studies show men tend to be overconfident and less likely to seek another opinion," Walsh says. Women, she adds are "less excited" about investing. All this leads to less of a gambling mentality among women and makes men more vulnerable to a fraud pitch.
So what are men to do? "Ask and check," Walsh says. "Develop a plan. Stick to it. And ask questions." She adds that men are more impulsive investors – so having a plan makes it easier to dial back on emotional investing. Lofton's remedies are more challenging to certain men, because they involve listening. And not the kind of "yes, dear" head-nodding while watching SportsCenter's top 10 plays. "If the man is lucky enough to have a wife or girlfriend, bring them into the discussion, share the decision with them. Women will tamp down some of the crazier risk," she says. Legendary Fidelity fund manager "Pete Lynch involved his wife and daughters in a lot of decision making, and he did pretty well," she says.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Any indices referenced are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. See Disclosures.
Dale S. Lam, CPA / PFS, CFP®
Dale S. Lam, is the founder and owner of Strategent Financial, LLC. Dale has an extensive financial background and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®). He is also a Personal Financial Specialist (PFS) through the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
Q: Why did you choose to establish your firm as an independent registered investment adviser?
A: Since we are independent, we have no proprietary investment products, sales incentives, or other financial bias, which means our investment recommendations to our clients are objective, free of conflicts of interest, and in their best interest.
View more Q&A »
Investment Advice from a Football Coach?
Putting Interest Rates into Perspective
A Glimpse Towards the Future
A Taxing Time
Strategent Financial primarily serves a select group of clients, primarily high net-worth individuals and families, businesses, 401(k)'s, and non-profit organizations. Our clients receive tailored solutions specific to their unique situations.
185 Neff Avenue, Suite 102
info@strategentfinancial.com
Strategent Financial © 2015-2019 All Rights Reserved | Disclosures | Form CRS | Site by ITD Interactive

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


There seem to be a few potential ways to fire an interrupt on data arriving on a Serial port. Which is the most robust/correct way? I am handling three different Serial communications separately Serial1,2,3.
probably write your own handlers that is specific to what you need but you haven't given an example of what your trying to do (Forum Rule)?
I simply want to see an example of the best practice way to enable the handler. I am comfortable with the code I will put in the handler, probably just read from the buffer and switch a volatile flag for use elsewhere.
For what I'm trying to do -- I am controlling a series of actuators that communicate via Serial. The provide responses at unpredictable times so the best approach for me is to implement a handler that checks the serial buffer at the right times. Right now I check the serial buffer right before I send my next command, but that is not a very good approach. Interrupts would be better. I was going to try a simple Arduino style FALLING pin interrupt on the RX pin, but I suspect there is a better way that is more native to this processor and the way it handles serial.
Last edited by dmhummel; 04-07-2015 at 11:21 PM.
Huh? Hardware Serial with interrupt driven buffered I/O exists in the Teensy drivers.
How do I trigger code to process the read buffer?
Overkill: FreeRTOS multitasking and a task suspends until serial received.
you can use the builtin serialEvent to trigger a callback when data is available. It works from the yield function which is called throughout the core so it will simulate using the actual isr. You can call yield() in your own functions to.
Good Info duff. Both the impact/value of yield() and the ease of use of serialEvent1(). Based on the .cc/tutorial it has a more complete example showing you don't have to be afraid of doing work in the serialEvent1() function like you would in the case of true interrupt code. Also the tutorial shows since it takes [yield() or] exiting loop() you don't have to worry with disabling interrupts when working with flag values that can be set in the serialEvent1() code. Also no explicit setup of the interrupt or function to be called!
Using the above info I created a sketch with SerialEvent #1 and #3 and made a demo of having the Event() handler pulling the characters outside loop() and then just checking for the newline to have been received completing a string.
I started with a 'Serial Event example' and ping pong when Serial1 gets a '\n' it showed on USB and wrote to Serial3. To make sure USB didn't slow things down I ended with it showing strings only every 10th millis() incoming - the spew was too fast to scan anyhow. In the attached code I put in a periodic delay() that is now commented out, but gave a short Serial rest on alternate ports.
There is nothing graceful about this code - I just hacked a duplicate of what was in the sample and added variables willy-nilly when I thought to extend something - and then I quit.
Last edited by defragster; 04-12-2015 at 08:44 AM.
Need DMA on the UARTs at those speeds. Without it, and with no FIFOs, way too many interrupts per second.
This is a little off track, but that serialEvent() example in the Arduino tutorial seems not robust -- the received string isn't terminated with a '0', and if another char comes in between the StringComplete and the loop, it will be appended -- therefore the received string isn't guaranteed to end with a '\n'. Is this a better way ?
As far as two strings at once - somehow that isn't happening - the timing is such that even at these speeds it is bounding on the '\n' - otherwise my USB print would show the partial next string.
ran over night on my 3.1 at 921600 baud with no apparent hitches - the only break was when I yanked the 'cable' and it forced a restart. So the onboard FIFO's and software used are up to the task. As noted I throttled 10:1 the USB output back to prevent that I/O from messing up the serial.
My problem on the LC may very well have been a bad multiplier math? I'm not sure they both have the same FIFO support on all ports either.
serialEvent() is difficult to find in the main web pages for the Arduino library documentation.
@defragster: But at these UART speeds, what's the interrupt rate and %CPU used in ISRs and so on. Esp. on the LC.
I'm accustomed to reading a string with the '\n' replaced with a '\0'.
Also, does serialEvent() check for max string length overrun?
And of course, not all incoming serial data is text/string (vs. 8 bit unsigned chars). Need a mode flag.
Last edited by stevech; 04-12-2015 at 05:31 PM.
This was just a proof of concept and example for the Serial Event. There isn't much on it - but it works amazingly simply and amazingly well so not much to say.
As far a speed - worst case you might BURST at these speeds and it works - but if you are running the Serial at these rates you are not doing much else. Good thing was both send and receive using the #1 and #3 hardware could do what they did - and they did it on the same Teensy at the same time. So in practice as a Debug tool or real interface - the sender or receiver only does half the work - and then doesn't spit the same strings to USB either.
Again it wasn't made to be pretty - just took the example and made it do this which seems simple and effective to answer the OP question - the Teensy Serial IO can be done outside the main loop at high speed without major impact and without complicated attention to interrupts or trying to improve it.
... if you are running the Serial at these rates you are not doing much else.
Indeed. And that's the reason for saying DMA is needed. With that, there's lots of CPU time to spare.
As a [contrived] demo of the potential and use of serialEvent() - this worked well with 2 ports on one Teensy. I just cross wired two 220000baud ports from 3.1 to LC and they work as it was written 188K messages (times 2 paired ports) passed in 9 minutes - 3 milliseconds between ~19 char messages.
For real use, YMMV. It has some obvious problems.-Thinking of making a MarkII version because splitting the wires from LC:LC and 3.1:3.1 as LC:3.1 and 3.1:LC it can see one not keeping pace with the other after power cycling one. Lost data as one passes the NL and reads into the next message - restart is also broken as the ping/pong restart only hits one channel pair - and with two devices I now have two pairs that no longer share the same routes but do share restart variables.
Serial data transfer was trivial - stripping ends of two wires to join two pairs of pins was easy thanks to the Teensy Card! I have the ease and reliability of interrupt background task, with about zero effort. Some effort to add more robustness depends on the needs and constraints. And options for means of transmission and the needs.
I just found I had placed a delay(5) that was representing 50% of the processor power reserved. Because without the delay the 3.1 is hitting 2 msec/msg and the LC is at 3 msc/msg. As noted the two linked slows to 3msec per message [xmit and rcv on each pair] and the 1 message lost out of 400,000 was probably on startup.
because with both send and rcv on each message the LC has some spare cycles left thanks to the FIFO's - the 3.1 doubly so.
Last edited by defragster; 04-13-2015 at 02:40 AM.
Found I had a delay(5) on both transmit spots [I had removed one and the asymmetry was tolerated] - removed the second and the average time between \n's is 1.14ms/msg at 22 char msg (longer now that millis() == 151971346) - it include the Millis() so coming up on 42hrs running both legs LC::3.1 and 3.1::LC - where one leg then feeds the other as each device #1 and #3 receive on one and print on the other.
Minor edits to check failure on each leg. Only comm break was when one wire popped out - I put it back in and it recovered that leg recording the missed messages. Because on leg feeds the other the miss counts match in both devices. Retry messages hit mostly the broken leg 10 times on one unit and the other unit did 1 and the other two legs didn't retry - the 3.1 hit 5 seconds first and it's retry kept the others happy but aware.
Lots of room for code improvement depending on real use case - as this is a four port ping pong match over two devices means two players with two paddles each - and two balls in play.
Minor tweaks two separate the two legs inside each Teensy, for recovery - but no integrity check other than msg ends on \n and each one counted and once received it sends out the other port - not back to where it came. And I stopped reading once a \n was received and didn't read again until the response was set out the other port. And on 5 sec failure to receive I waited 1 sec between Restart messages.
The serial is buffered - but my short messages (as I read the serial sources) fit in the Tx==40 (on #3) and Rx==64 byte default buffer - so the hardware handles each message in a buffer, things would be different out side those ranges, or repeated messages without the alternate send/rcv ping pong.
Quite a lot of interaction in a simple test case. Ideally there would be a second receive buffer reading while waiting for the send response to transmit - but I'd want to do that with cleaner arrays than hard coded indexes - including the serial port instances which require duplicate code with alternate references. You might guess I'm enjoying this after 17 years of vacation from coding. These Teensy's are cool and way more powerful than my first computer [CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 1.774 MHz, Memory: 4 KB ~ 48 KB ] - and way less expensive [$700].
Can I use interrupts in this case?
serialEvent1() is not based on interrupts - just called on each exit of loop() or use of delay() in user code. The Teensy 3.1/3.2 Serial1 hardware has an 8 byte FIFO and uses interrupts as needed to keep data flowing in and out of the buffer space for read or write.
But - yes in general interrupts can surely be used where useful or supported. For a Teensy 115K baud isn't very fast - it can generally do 2 or 3 M baud reliably along with other tasks interrupt or otherwise.
My assumption was that serialEvent1() was based on interrupts.
I'm trying to do a serial logger, which stores packets to SD card.
at loop level poll the data store and write to uSD card in junks of 512 bytes.
Perhaps worth to mention that it would be 1152 interrupts/second.. 115200 BITs/Seconds .. 8 Bit per char +Startbit + Stopbit.. = 10 BIT, 1 Interrupt per char. (A bit more than 1KB/second - really slow for a Teensy 3.x).
But still, just use Serial.available() - or SerialEvent , and Serial1 (has largest FIFO+ Buffer) - no need for interrupts here.
This was my first initial approach and it works in 99% of time, but I still have lost/corrupted packets from time to time(really depends on a performance of SD card).
Collecting packets and writing them in chunks, as WMXZ described definitely improves the picture, but looks like I still need some sort of interrupt here.
WMXZ, do you mean https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_timin...rvalTimer.html ?


This is a lively resort and you'll see why if you take a look at all the activities going on, you can even learn circus tricks like the trapeze! There are more orthodox pastimes too, such as tennis and table tennis, with water sports included. You have a choice of four restaurants, plus a snack bar. Every night there's live entertainment and dancing later on in Hurricanes. That's not to mention the special theme nights including toga parties, talent competitions, karaoke nights and other madness!
4 restaurants: Buffet dining at The Banana Boat and more elegant dining at The Garden of Eden (continental à la carte), Martinos (Italian pasta bar), Munasun (à la carte Asian cuisine) and RASTAurant for quick snacks. 4 bars.
3 swimming pools including misting pool and Jacuzzi. Kayaks and sailing, with qualified instructors. Basketball and volleyball. 3 floodlit tennis courts, table tennis and rock-climbing wall, jogging trail, board games and TV area with giant satellite screen. 24-hour fitness centre. Golf nearby*. Special activities: sumo wrestling, bouncy boxing, flying trapeze, body-painting contest and reggae classes.
Hurricanes disco, piano bar. Tropical shows, steel-pan bands, guest and staff talent show, karaoke nights, weekly theme parties.
Gift Shop. Complimentary WiFi access.
Wheelchair adapted rooms with partially accessible amenities or facilities available on request. Please note that these rooms are subject to availability and may be restricted to specific room categories and bedding arrangements.
Please note: All guests must be aged 16 years and over.
400 rooms on up to 8 floors with 4 lifts. All with air-conditioning, balcony or terrace, satellite TV, CD player, tea/coffee-making facilities, WiFi, iron and board and hairdryer. Classic Rooms are located in both towers with garden views, with either 1 king-size bed or 2 double beds, sleeping maximum 3 adults.


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text:
Q: Calculating 1 point per 10 pounds I am working on a weight-loss app (similar to Weight Watchers), but I'm not sure how to add 1 "point" per 10 pounds of a person's weight.
Here's what I have so far: a user gets a certain number of points per day, and one point is added per ten pounds of weight. That is, a 100-pound user would have 10 points added to their daily points.
How would I do this calculation?
$(init);

var points = 0;//points start at 0

function init()
{
    $('#submit').click(calculatePoints);
    $('#statusBox').hide();
}

function calculatePoints()
{
    var female = $('input[id="fem"]:checked').val();//get value of gender radio buttons
    var male = $('input[id="male"]:checked').val();
    var age = $('#age').val();//value of age
    var weight = $('#weight').val();//value of weight
    var actHard = $('input[id="hard"]:checked').val();//value of lifestyle radio buttons
    var actMod = $('input[id="mod"]:checked').val();
    var actSed = $('input[id="sed"]:checked').val();

    if (female)
    {
        points=8;
    }

    else
    {
        points=2;
    }

    if (age<=26)
    {
        points=4
    }

    else if(age<=37)
    {
        points=3;
    }

    else if(age<=47)
    {
        points=2;
    }

    else
    {
        points=1;
    }
}

A: Sounds like you just need to divide their weight by 10.
points += weight / 10;

A: points += Math.round(weight / 10);
That should do it. And make sure the user typed their weight in pounds, or you'll have to convert it.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Wastewater Treatment Facility Announced
boblagasse September 12, 2022
Our federal and provincial governments recently announced their investment in a new regional wastewater treatment facility for the municipalities of Niverville, Taché, Hanover, and Ritchot. More than $39 million in funding will go towards the construction of a regional mechanical wastewater treatment facility and collection network. The Red-Seine-Rat (RSR) wastewater treatment facility and conveyance system will provide these communities with the appropriate resources to help serve the current and future needs of a growing population.
The work will include the installation of a wastewater conveyance system with approximately 90 kilometres of effluent pipeline as well as new lift stations and pump stations. Once completed, the RSR project will result in increased capacity to treat and manage wastewater and stormwater, improve the environmental stewardship of the region, and encourage continued economic growth. Further, the greenhouse-gas reductions achieved by moving these regional partners away from traditional wastewater lagoons to this new mechanical wastewater treatment facility will support both Manitoba and Canada's emission reduction goals.
The Government of Canada is investing more than $21.6 million in this project through the Green Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program, while the Manitoba government is investing over $18 million.
I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone of Rail Safety Awareness Week. In 2018, the Legislative Assembly passed my private member's bill to establish the Rail Safety Awareness Week Act – legislation creating an annual Rail Safety Awareness Week in late September, and making our province the first one in Canada to put such an event into law in an effort to reduce railway-related accidents, injuries and deaths.
This year, Rail Safety Awareness Week will be taking place from Sept. 19 to Sept. 25, and will involve public education across our province. I encourage everyone to take part wherever possible.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact my constituency office.
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Pepper Coast Ministries is a newly founded grassroots international missions and partnership organization, formed in 2017, based in Louisville Kentucky,.
It is a natural extension of the Ahlers family 2006 adoption of 5 teenagers from Liberia West Africa.
Their love for their children, and their children's African families, friends, and homeland has captivated their hearts and kept them connected and invested in the people of Liberia.
After 11 years of working, visiting, and building relationships with the people in the country, the Ahlers family is both adopting from Liberia again and starting Pepper Coast Ministries.
Alicia and Glenn Ahlers received a full grant from Naomi's Fund, to bring their daughter Faith home from Liberia at this time!
In order to take full advantage of the time they must be in Liberia to complete their adoption, they hope to bring a team to grow their long time developing ministry, as well as bring their children who have never seen or experienced the struggles of their adopted sibling's homeland.


Photograph of school children standing beside the Des Moines School in Wabaunsee County, Kansas. Some of the students are identified as: Nelly Caley, Robert Moore, Orville Kraus, Juanita Keen Wood, Virgil Kraus, Hazel Kraus, Vernon Kraus, Lowell Kraus, Byron Moore, Helen Kraus, Laverna Moore, Lela Houser, Helen Dorgan, Opal Kraus, Marvin Caley, Harold Reynolds, and Gail Hasting. The teacher is identified as Agnes Beagle.


text:
LTU Symposium to Explore Design and Technology Solutions for Detroit on October 8
HomeNewsLTU Symposium to Explore Design and Technology Solutions for Detroit on October 8
"Reclaiming Detroit with Design and Technology" is the topic of the annual President's Symposium at Lawrence Technological University on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m.
The moderator will be Frank Beckmann, the mid-morning host for WJR News/Talk 760.
Robert Gregory, senior vice president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership.
Rainy Hamilton, Jr., co-founder and principal of Hamilton Anderson Associates.
W. Kim Heron, web and publications writer for the Kresge Foundation.
Faye Nelson, president and CEO of the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy.
LTU President Virinder Moudgil founded the annual symposium last year to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to major challenges facing the Metro Detroit region. The four panelists were selected because of the different perspectives they can offer on the task of revitalizing the city of Detroit.
"We all know by now that there is no silver bullet when it comes to returning the city of Detroit to prosperity," Moudgil said. "We must be prepared to listen to a variety of creative and effective solutions and then seek common ground. That is the guiding principle of this annual symposium series."
The symposium will be held in the LTU Architecture Building Auditorium (A200), 21000 West 10 Mile Road in Southfield. Admission is free, but seating is limited. Reservations can be made at lawrencetech.net/2013symposium. To RSVP or for information, contact Kate Roy at (248) 204-2805 or kroy@ltu.edu.
A reception will begin prior to the symposium at 5:30 p.m. in the Architecture Galley (A210) with a silent auction in support of the restoration of LTU's Affleck House in Bloomfield Hills, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Lawrence Technological University, www.ltu.edu, is a private university founded in 1932 that offers more than 100 programs through the doctoral level in its Colleges of Architecture and Design, Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Management. PayScale lists Lawrence Tech among the nation's top 7 percent of universities for return on undergraduate tuition investment, and highest in the Detroit metropolitan area. Lawrence Tech is also listed in the top tier of Midwestern universities by U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review. Students benefit from small class sizes and experienced faculty who provide a real-world, hands-on, "theory and practice" education with an emphasis on leadership. Activities on Lawrence Tech's 102-acre campus include over 60 student clubs and organizations and a growing roster of NAIA varsity sports.


text:
module Atlas
  class Preset
    # Describes scenarios which are to be scaled down to a smaller region size.
    class Scaling
      include ValueObject
      include ActiveModel::Validations

      values do
        attribute :area_attribute,  String
        attribute :value,           Integer
        attribute :base_value,      Integer
        attribute :has_agriculture, Boolean
        attribute :has_industry,    Boolean
        attribute :has_energy,      Boolean
      end

      validates :area_attribute, presence: true
      validates :value,          presence: true, numericality: true
      validates :base_value,     presence: true, numericality: true

      def factor
        value.to_r / base_value.to_r
      end
    end
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
New hack challenge from Eramet for the TC Hackathon at VivaTech
April 23, 2019	Off	By Jill T Frey
There's no question that springtime in Paris is the stuff of legend. TechCrunch is returning to the City of Lights to continue building another legendary experience. The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place at the Expo Porte de Versailles on 17-18 May. If you're a developer, a UX/UI designer or an all-around tech creator, don't miss this chance to collaborate, compete and create something great.
Thanks to stellar sponsored hack contests, you can win serious cash and other awesome prizes in the process. There's no fee to enter, but get your free hackathon ticket now, because they won't last long.
Thousands of startup founders, business leaders, investors, academics, students and media across Europe and beyond will descend on VivaTech, which makes it the perfect place to host a hackathon of epic proportion.
Here's how it all works:
Form or join a team and take on a specific hack challenge put forth by the hack sponsors. Fuel up on whatever gets you through the night, because you have just 24 hours to work your tech magic, wield your mighty coding skills and produce a working solution.
It's pencils down after 24 hours, and then your sleep-deprived team will have just 60 seconds to deliver a rapid-fire presentation to our hackathon judges. Each team receives a score between one and five, and the team with the highest score wins the prize associated with the sponsored hack. In addition, TechCrunch will award a €5,000 grand prize for the best overall hack.
All teams that receive a combined score of three or higher also win tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 and VivaTech 2020.
We're stoked to announce the details of the latest hack contest from our sponsor, Eramet:
In the 21st century, metal alloys are everywhere, e.g. computers, electric cars, satellites. You can find up to 20 different alloys in a single computer. The quality requirements of customers are extremely tight nowadays. Eramet, a global mining and metallurgical group, challenges you to find a solution that can provide our customers with 100 percent transparency on our supply chains, from the extraction of ore from the mine to the final product, with a heavy focus on the quality, environmental, social and ethical aspects. The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.
In case you missed it, we already announced a contest from EDHEC. The company's offering a €5,000 prize to the team that creates the best product to help students make sure they choose the course of studies and career that's right for them.
Be sure to keep checking back, because we'll announce plenty more sponsored contests — with awesome prizes — in the coming weeks.
The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place on May 17-18. Are you ready to put your skills to the ultimate test and become a legend in your own right? Get your free ticket and join us in Paris. We can't wait to see what you create!
CategoryEramet Events TC TechCrunch Hackathon TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech Vivatech
Tesla vaunts creation of 'the best chip in the world' for self-driving
Twitter Q1 flies past estimates with sales of $787M and EPS of $0.25, but MAUs drop to 330M


text:
#60: How to Get Your First Million Podcast Downloads | Doug Mother F*cking Sandler
Shareable listeners! We've reached the end of Season 2! Already!
We hope you've enjoyed all of the deep dives we brought your way on topics like sales, public speaking, leadership, management, and much more.
We felt it like it was only fitting to end the season with one of our favorite guests and our first guest, yes...
#59: No One is Coming...So Let's Get Empowered | Jennifer Iannolo
Hey there, Shareable listeners!
We hope you enjoyed public speaking week and all of the wisdom that our guests brought to your ears!
This week, we're bringing another boss-ass lady your way! It's Jennifer Iannolo, pronounced (Ya-know-low)!
As a featured speaker for the U.S. State Department, Jennifer travels the world...
#58: How to Improve Your Company Culture with Improv | Mike Ganino
Hey, it's the last day of Public Speaking week!
We hope you've enjoyed the amazing public speakers we've already brought your way, and now we're finishing up strong with Mike Ganino, Jeff's very own best friend!
Mike has spent over 20 years in the hospitality, travel, and tech industry helping to grow iconic brands like...
#57: How to Prepare for Public Speaking like a Toastmasters International Winner | Aaron Beverly
Shareable listeners! We're bringing you another week packed with new episodes, but this time they're all about public speaking. Some of us embrace it, many of us fear it, and Jeff and Caroline set out to conquer it with three deep dive episodes with public speakers sharing their advice on the subject and bunch of other...
#56: How to Diversify Your Revenue Stream | Dorie Clark
Hello there! Today we're bringing you Dorie Clark for our second episode of public speaking week! Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant, professional speaker, and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. She's recognized as a "branding expert" by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Inc. magazine,...


text:
Pinterest and the Subtle Poison of Sexism and Racism in Silicon Valley
By Janice Min
March 22, 2021 11:59 AM EDT
The day Françoise Brougher was fired from Pinterest began like so many of her workdays. It was April 2, 2020, and the company's chief operating officer—with her rescue dog Dogbert nearby—was a few weeks into the pandemic and remote work, managing her team of 750 from her home in Silicon Valley. The gentlest social media site, built for "pinning" visual inspiration to virtual boards, appeared to be in equilibrium.
Brougher wasn't giving much thought to the recent brief but irritating meetings and calls she had had with Todd Morgenfeld, the company's chief financial officer. On a recent Friday, she had texted their mutual boss, Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, about what she describes as a particularly dismissive and erratic interaction she had with Morgenfeld where he had hung up on her. On Monday, Silbermann suggested Brougher talk to human resources to smooth over the conflict. It was the first time in Brougher's 30-year career she had gone to HR about her own issue.
Now, a few weeks later, Jo Dennis, Pinterest's chief human-resources officer, was on the line. "She said, 'I want to prepare you for your call with Ben tomorrow,'" recalls Brougher, who had a standing one-on-one scheduled with her boss. "'Your job is going to change.'"
"I said, 'Oh interesting, can you tell me more?' She said, 'No, I cannot,'" says Brougher. "And I said, O.K., don't waste my time. Put Ben on the call.'" A calendar invite from Silbermann soon popped up on Brougher's screen. They exchanged brief pleasantries. Then, he fired his second-in-command over video chat. "I never saw it coming," she says. "I was like the intern, fired in a 10-minute call."
"The line was crossed when a description of my performance was reduced to my gender," says Francoise Brougher.
Lisa DeNeffe
And thus the French-born engineer, 55, would begin a journey far from her decades of anonymity as a Harvard Business School graduate and respected senior executive at Google and Square, suing a company with a market cap today of $122 billion for gender discrimination—the most senior Silicon Valley executive ever to do so. Now, in her first major interview since her lawsuit settled, Brougher says flatly of her last day at Pinterest, "No, we didn't have a giant going-away party."
That month, Ifeoma Ozoma was waging her own battle at Pinterest. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Ozoma, a Yale graduate who joined Pinterest from Facebook, had been new to the company's burgeoning public-policy and social-impact department. Wonky and raised in Anchorage, she was behind widely praised Pinterest initiatives that blocked searches for antivaccination posts and stopped promotion of plantation weddings. She also had concluded that she and another experienced woman on her team, Aerica Shimizu Banks, who is Black and Japanese American, were being paid less than what their job descriptions indicated per Pinterest guidelines. Ozoma's salary disparity—about $64,000 annually—was significant but not as meaningful as the stock grant given every employee based on position, and hers appeared to be 33,675 shares short of what her job description merited. Post-IPO, she says the shares could have amounted to a value close to $2.5 million over a four-year period of vesting. After human resources refused to increase their compensation, they involved a lawyer. The friction, Ozoma believed, caused her white male manager to snipe with statements such as, "Why does everything have to be about race?" Later, Ozoma's cell-phone number and internal company emails appeared on extremist platforms including 4chan and 8chan following leaks by a white male colleague, a software developer, to Project Veritas, the far-right activist group founded by James O'Keefe. She received threats of rape and death. She kept a gun. She moved. And then she and Banks, whose allegations of mistreatment were dismissed by the company after repeated internal investigations, negotiated their departures in May.
When, on June 2, in the wake of George Floyd's death, the company posted an earnest Black Lives Matter message on its corporate website and social channels, Ozoma reached her breaking point. "Are you f-cking kidding me?" she thought. Days later, she and Banks, 33, would go public with their stories, violating nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) attached to their severance packages. "I lost my mother in college," says Ozoma, 28. "I can't think of a single thing I've been afraid of since then, because the worst thing that could happen to me already did."
Over the next months, Pinterest's warm, fuzzy veneer would unravel like one of the platform's chunky knitted sweaters. An employee walkout to show solidarity for Ozoma, Banks and Brougher followed; Pinterest hired law firm WilmerHale to conduct an investigation of workplace culture; a shareholder lawsuit alleged mishandling around issues of discrimination; and a record $22.5 million settlement was paid to Brougher—the largest known settlement for gender discrimination in U.S. history—with $2.5 million of that jointly committed to nonprofits that support underrepresented groups in tech.
Now, nearly a year after their departures, Brougher and the two colleagues she had never met while at Pinterest—all performance-driven, and obsessed with process and results—stand among the most significant figures in a reckoning not just at Pinterest, but in the long exclusionary saga of Silicon Valley, where 5% of tech leaders are women, far fewer are Black or Latinx, and only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. Their stories fit an unnerving pattern in an industry once optimistic about changing the world that instead has fallen behind even legacy industries in diversity and inclusion. This, even as study after study, in particular a 2015 McKinsey report, reveals how diverse teams perform better financially. Pinterest, Google, Oracle, MailChimp and Facebook are among the behemoths that publicly champion women and diversity through initiatives and hashtags — even as their own employees come forward as regularly as smartphones on an assembly line with allegations of discrimination and pay disparity. Ozoma calls much of Silicon Valley's talk performative, or, as she puts it, "diversity theater."
San Francisco attorney David Lowe represented Brougher and has argued dozens of gender-discrimination cases. His firm handled Ellen Pao's landmark gender-discrimination case. He calls the stories of professional women "startlingly similar." "Often the critiques are, like what Françoise heard, 'You are not collaborative, not good with working with others. Too assertive,'" he says. Being a person of color adds another layer of potential bias and pain, particularly, as in the case of Ozoma and Banks, when a company's external messaging is at odds with its internal culture or stated company values.
"As you go higher, the number of women and people of color thin out," says Lowe. "When you get to the apex, there are hardly any. It's not because they lose talent or interest. In fact they are gaining talent. The only plausible explanation is that stereotypes and subtle forms of bias seep in. It's like climbing a ladder and then getting knocked down, rung by rung."
Among all the big talk and little action, the three women are now taking extraordinary steps to help fix things themselves. Brougher says the first two organizations that have received money from her settlement are /dev/color, which supports a professional network of Black engineers, and Last Mile Education Fund, which offers financial support for low-income students to bring them to graduation and into tech. After attorney's fees and taxes, Brougher and her husband Bill additionally have set aside half of her remaining settlement for groups with similar missions through a donor-advised fund. From the other half, they paid off their mortgage and gave directly to other causes, including medical research. "Some donations will be public, some not," says Brougher, whose parents never graduated college. "I'm trying to do good with what I got."
Meanwhile, Ozoma and Banks are flexing their public-policy skills. A California senate committee will hear arguments on March 23 for legislation abolishing employer NDAs around racial discrimination that they and their attorney helped draft. Ozoma raised $108,000 to support the cause and, along with state senator Connie Leyva, Earthseed, her own consulting firm, will act as the bill's co-sponsor. Ozoma will offer main testimony on behalf of the bill; their lawyer, Peter Rukin, will be the second person to testify in favor, on behalf of the California Employment Lawyers Association. Banks' powerful letter of support also has been submitted to State Senator Leyva, in which she condemns how NDAs leave victims to "suffer in silence."
How it happens
In the past decade, social media has been used to share often devastating stories using #MeToo, #BlackLives Matter or more recently #StopAsianHate. Those who post often are met with even more abuse, threats of violence and graphic memes. Consequences for harassment are rare. The consistent message sent to the outspoken: Shut up. Or else.
Pinterest was considered different. A sort of Internet Xanax, since its 2010 launch, it has been a haven for the women who comprise 70% of its users and tilt toward the crafty and domestic. The perils of other social media—the trolling, the culture wars—are largely absent. The top-performing content is about food and drink; after that, home decor. With his benign platform and mild-mannered image, Silbermann, a 38-year-old Iowan, wasn't a swaggering mononym à la Bezos and Zuck, and certainly wasn't subject to congressional tongue-lashings or consumer finger-wags. President Trump—presumably not a baker or scrapbooker—never became one of the 459 million users of Pinterest, instead communicating on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
It was the potential of that special culture, not yet as buzzy or revenue-optimized as its peers, that attracted Brougher and Ozoma to Pinterest in 2018 a few months apart; Banks joined in 2019. "Like everyone else, I thought Ben was very reserved and thoughtful," says Brougher. "I was excited." Another selling point was Pinterest's upcoming IPO. "Every Big Tech employee's dream is to work pre-IPO at a company," says Ozoma. "This wasn't some no-name startup. This was a company that people love."
Brougher and Ozoma each would survive Pinterest for only 23 months.
Banks, drawn by the opportunity to lead Pinterest's Washington, D.C., office, just 12.
At Google, Brougher had run "an unsexy part of [ad] sales," recalls former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, now Twitter's board chair. But Brougher became a star, driving revenue for small and medium business to 23% year-over-year growth near the end of her tenure, delivering an annual $16 billion in sales. "She would say, 'Here's my return. Here it is by cohort; here it is by month. And here's what I've given you for the last quarter, and what I'm going to do next quarter. And that's why you should allow me to hire another 46 people,'" says Pichette, laughing. "Resistance was futile … but she also takes the time to listen. Fairness matters to her."
In 2013, Brougher joined Square, reporting to CEO Jack Dorsey as business lead for the payments platform startup. Like Google, Square had a similar Silicon Valley culture of candor; Brougher recalls the environment as "incredibly egalitarian." "One of the things we've both always agreed on is you come to work to be respected, not to be liked," says Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Brougher's colleague as Square's CFO. "I actually didn't think about my gender a lot. I worked on Wall Street for 11 years, and believe me, I thought about my gender." They were both part of the team that brought Square to its 2015 IPO. Today it's worth $107 billion.
Brougher became Pinterest's first chief operating officer and its most senior woman. Pinterest's sluggish $500 million in annual ad sales needed goosing before the April 2019 IPO. Brougher was given half the company, including global ad sales and marketing.
Immediately, she noticed something amiss in the San Francisco headquarters: The culture was secretive. Turnover was high. Decisions were made between Silbermann and a small circle—all men—in private sidebars, causing organizational chaos. Recalls Banks: "The entire structure was built on being friends with the CEO." Soon, Brougher, who calls herself "excessively transparent," wasn't being invited to certain meetings. "I asked why once, twice, and there was always an excuse. And then I'm trying at the next meeting to really contribute to the team, thinking, 'Maybe they will invite me to the next one.'"
A CNBC story in 2019 detailed the dysfunctional culture. The story ran with the headline, "The nicest company in Silicon Valley: How Pinterest's friendly culture has slowed decisions and hurt growth." The writer argued that Pinterest's avoidant culture was diametrically opposed to confrontational styles at an Amazon or Netflix, citing missed revenue targets set by investor Andreessen Horowitz. One former employee, who claimed to be fired for insubordination after criticizing a strategy by one of Silbermann's staff, told CNBC there was an extremely passive-aggressive climate. Or as Brougher would later say, "Saying what you really thought was still dangerous at Pinterest."
In response to request for comment on this story, Pinterest declined to make any executives available, but answered some specific questions and issued a statement detailing their commitment to diversity and inclusion and steps they have taken to improve internal culture.
For the first time in her career, maybe her life, Brougher felt self-conscious. "You speak up and have the feeling people are not focused on what you said," she says. "A lot has been written about 'othering,' that you could be viewed as a female or Black first, not as your job." In his court filing for Brougher, attorney Lowe cited a 2014 study by Kieran Snyder of tech-industry performance reviews that revealed an "abrasiveness trap" for women, where women are given feedback to be nicer and speak less. The study says "negative personality criticism—Watch your tone! Step back! Stop being so judgmental!"—showed up in 2.2% of reviews of men but 76% of women, even when reviewed by women.
"Having a seat at the table matters, but [also] having a voice at the table matters," says Brougher. "I didn't think [Ben] was happy when I had a different opinion. I think when it came from a woman, it was much harder to accept." Adds Lowe, "So many features of Silicon Valley culture—to be disruptive, challenge the status quo, push back on authority—reward men who show up like that, but are negatives in reviews of women."
"The entire strategy was, 'Lay low. Don't weigh in on anything,'" says Ifeoma Ozoma. "And I was like, 'This is not controversial.'"
Adria Malcolm
Ozoma eventually would find this to be true. She interned two summers at Google before starting in its massive public-policy and government-affairs department in 2015. Three years later, she left for Facebook, where she contributed to anti-hate-speech initiatives and community standards. There she grew comfortable challenging leadership. "There were meetings where Mark [Zuckerberg] would address the whole company," she says. "After Charlottesville, he said nothing about the [white supremacists] who had organized on the platform. During the Q&A, I asked, 'Why haven't you said anything to employees about Nazis marching in the street?'" Zuckerberg commended her bravery in asking the question, and the audience applauded. He admitted he should have spoken up sooner. Ozoma then questioned Sheryl Sandberg about the difficulty in reporting hate speech in the Messenger app; Sandberg said she would escalate a product fix to make it easier. But Ozoma says people looked shocked when Sandberg, appearing to deflect Facebook's blame, discussed how much Zuckerberg donated to support social-justice causes. She saved the email the head of diversity and inclusion, also a Black woman, sent her after. "When you asked the question of Mark … there was so much energy in the exchange. I'd love to get a solid understanding from you about what you are feeling and expressing." Still, there was no retaliation. "Facebook is direct," says former head of content at Facebook, Janett Riebe, who would later be a colleague at Pinterest as its safety policy manager. "Radical candor would be a euphemism to describe it."
In July 2018, Ozoma became the second employee at Pinterest in public policy and social impact, a new department amid growing calls for tech accountability. (Ten months into her job, in May 2019, she helped recruit Banks, a seasoned veteran from Google and of the Obama Administration, with a master's from Oxford.) Ozoma believes from her first meeting she ran afoul of leadership when she questioned the company's decision to keep InfoWars' Alex Jones on the platform. "The entire strategy was, 'Lay low. Don't weigh in on anything,'" says Ozoma. "And I was like, 'This is not controversial.' This is someone who is harassing the parents of Sandy Hook." Shortly after an inquiry from the tech news site Mashable in August 2018, Mashable reported that Pinterest had removed InfoWars from the platform.
Ozoma, like Brougher, kept pushing for change at Pinterest, developing relationships with the World Health Organization and the CDC to manage health misinformation. She also pushed to stop promotion of plantation weddings. "The not-nice way of saying it is, I am a sh-t starter," she says. "It was, 'How do we differentiate ourselves not only having the product but also values and matching the two?'" Her six-month performance review, delivered by her manager Charlie Hale, said she "always exceeded expectations." Ozoma even received a gift from the company acknowledging her "leadership"; the email informing her read, "Look at you, Rising Star!"
But Ozoma, Banks and Brougher separately had unearthed issues with their compensation. (A 2017 study found Black women in tech were paid 21% less than white men for comparable jobs; all women 16% less.) Ozoma was representing Pinterest in media, and before members of Congress and the U.K. Parliament. Upon seeing the company's hierarchy of "levels"—an organizational practice used in companies to assign pay—she believed her job description would have put her at a Level 6 instead of Level 4. The company argued she didn't have enough experience to advance levels, though the documentation didn't specify years of experience as a requirement. She enlisted attorney Rukin, who had represented plaintiffs in a class-action against Wells Fargo and other discrimination cases. Finding her own leveling at 5 instead of 6, Banks also enlisted Rukin. "[My lawyer] was like, 'I've never had a prospective client this organized with this much documentation,'" says Ozoma. "He told me, 'I don't anticipate needing to work more than 10 hours on this.'" Ten months later, with matters still unresolved, he filed complaints for both clients with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). (A Pinterest spokesperson says the company looked thoroughly into Ozoma's and Banks's concerns about whether they were properly leveled, and determined that their pay and level were appropriate. Both DFEH complaints were ultimately settled in mediation.)
Meanwhile, Pinterest's public-policy work kept gaining applause. Banks created a partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau; Ozoma was quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. Surgeon General retweeted a tweet that name-checked Ozoma. Proudly, Silbermann, the son of two doctors, put the tweet in the company Slack. "The day that I was on an interview with [NPR's] Audie Cornish, I was exchanging emails with my lawyer," says Ozoma. "I wasn't threatening. They knew that I was so loyal." But, she says, Hale took a turn. In one performance review, he acknowledged her work in deprioritizing slave-plantation content but said she should have provided "the pros" of promoting slave plantations. She says he would also verbally remark on her "tone" (as Banks said he would later do with her). After her personal information was leaked online by a male colleague, Ozoma says, even though she texted Silbermann screenshots of the threats she was receiving, the company did not help her have the content taken down, and she relied on friends from other tech companies. Riebe says the winds were shifting. "Once she persisted [about pay], it got nasty," says Riebe. "She was starting to be kept out of loops. She had a fantastic reputation, and then [there was] a slow morphing into, 'You are too much.'"
Banks was feeling gaslit even before she officially started. Hale told her Pinterest wouldn't publish a press release announcing her, a customary gesture by tech companies to inform Congress and lobbyists of a new point person. She says a recruiter also asked in a phone call that she not share details of her offer. (Since 2015, it has been illegal for California employers to ask workers to keep compensation confidential.) It all gave her a funny feeling. But Banks already had resigned from Google and felt "between a rock and a hard place." In her first month, she alerted the general counsel and other senior members of the team about the risk of employee information leaking from a potential attack from Project Veritas. The group claimed to be holding information from Pinterest. Banks says she was brushed off and told not to reply to the email chain again. The information dump ended up including the personal details about Ozoma shared on 8chan and 4chan.
In September 2019, Banks says Hale scolded her for not looping him in before Silbermann signed a "CEOs for Gun Safety" open letter to the U.S. Senate that earned wide praise (Pinterest disputes that account.) Soon after, Hale, Ozoma and Banks would recommend reversing a new Pinterest decision made by senior leadership to eliminate holiday pay for the lowest-paid contractors in food services, sanitation and security, many people of color and some disabled. An internal email suggests that the PR department grew concerned after an employee heard two of the workers bemoaning the cutbacks. Banks, whose mother was a low-wage housekeeper, was tasked with drafting the proposal; she consulted with two of the company's outside lobbying firms. She sent the proposal to general counsel Christine Flores; a long, painful chain of emails followed where Banks was accused of not following process or being professional. "She told me it wasn't my place to interfere in business decisions," recalls Banks. Flores told her the decision was being reversed, but that she had nothing to do with it. Flores later initiated an investigation, claiming Banks lied about buy-in from the lobbying firms. (A Pinterest spokesperson says the company disagrees with this characterization of their exchange.) Banks says one of the firms, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, denied their formal involvement to Flores. Banks, however, kept notes from their meeting, and emails, reviewed by TIME, where Brownstein execs congratulated her on the decision reversal. She and attorney Rukin never learned the outcome of the investigation. In her next review, Hale said a goal should be to "build her credibility." She continued to represent the company before the Department of Justice and members of Congress. She went on antidepressants for the first time in her life.
Eventually, Rukin would represent both women in their confidential negotiations to separate from the company. Banks was replaced by a white man.
That same year, a routine filing for Pinterest's IPO disclosed, among other information, compensation of the highest-paid executives, and Brougher learned of her own inequity. Brougher says she had been told that all executives had the same vesting schedule for their stock grants: 10% the first year, escalating to 40% in the fourth. She saw she was the only executive in leadership whose equity vested that slowly. In her first year, she vested 37% of what her closest peer, CFO Morgenfeld, had. She went to Silbermann; HR adjusted the grant. But that seemed to make things worse. She says she was disinvited from board meetings. When 2019's Q3 revenue targets were missed, she discovered engineering and product issues that contributed to ad serving problems. After raising the issue, she says she was disinvited from product meetings, which Silbermann oversaw. In her next review, she was told she was "not collaborative."
A Pinterest Inc. banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that Pinterest Inc. makes its initial public offering in New York City, on April 18, 2019.
Spencer Platt—Getty Images
Morgenfeld gave Brougher a peer evaluation in January 2020 (she was not asked to give one to him). Prompted to provide written remarks about her positive qualities, he came up with just one line: She "seems to be a champion for diversity issues." "It was very hurtful," says Brougher. "I'm keen to be recognized for my merit vs. my gender." Indeed, Brougher rarely wore her gender on her sleeve. The Information editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin recalls once proposing a story to Brougher when she was at Square about Dorsey's female lieutenants. Brougher, recalls Lessin, said to her, "There is no upside; there are so few of us."
On Silbermann's advice, Brougher called Morgenfeld to clear the air; she says he called her a liar about her description to Silbermann about their previous conversation and hung up on her. Silbermann shrugged, and according to her legal complaint, told her they were like "an old couple fighting over who would make coffee." Brougher was aghast. After that, Morgenfeld stopped speaking to her entirely. Brougher wrote Dennis one last time for help. She never answered. A week later, Brougher was fired, offered the standard severance from her employee agreement, asked to sign an NDA and to sign off on an announcement that she "resigned." She refused. "I said, 'You just let me go. Please write whatever you want. But write the truth because you are accountable for the truth.'" She called friends including Pichette. "She was angry in the way she can be where she stays calm. Laser guided," he says. "She knew she was done wrong."
The fight for fairness
On June 2, Pinterest, like other companies, posted Black Lives Matter messaging after George Floyd was killed. "With everything we do, we will make it clear that our Black employees matter," wrote Silbermann on the company website. Incredulous, Ozoma and Banks, 13 days later, laid bare details from their Pinterest tenures on Twitter. The women rolled out their words like a policy campaign: writing tweets in advance, deciding what time to post and giving their extensive press contacts a heads-up. They went viral. Lady Gaga posted the news on Instagram. The Washington Post, Fast Company and NPR jumped on the story. Insider talked to nine more Pinterest employees with similar stories about abusive behavior, lower pay, and medical and psychiatric problems said to have arisen from company toxicity. "People were crying every single day," one employee told Insider.
It was the first time Brougher learned about what happened to Ozoma and Banks.
Brougher had been working with her attorney, Lowe, on a settlement. When Lowe's firm had represented Pao in her 2012 trial against venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, it had been the highest-profile case alleging gender discrimination in Silicon Valley. During the trial, in something media deemed the "Pao effect," women at Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft would also sue for gender discrimination, inspired by her actions. "Ellen's case broke ground not just for Françoise but for others," says Lowe. Pao was offered a settlement but declined due to its requisite NDA. She lost her jury trial. The opposing counsel at the time, attorney Melinda Reichert (who would also serve as opposing counsel for Pinterest against Ozoma, Banks and Brougher) gave a 2015 interview to Bloomberg Law, where she discredited gender discrimination as a reality: "I just find that kind of hard to believe because I look at women who are successful — like Sheryl Sandberg. She says that women have to do things differently than men do to succeed. If you're constantly thinking that you're being treated differently, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Lowe tried bringing Pinterest to the table for a financial settlement for nearly five months. He was ready to file suit, but Brougher wanted to write a blog post in her own words as well. Uber engineer Susan Fowler had done so a few years ago, triggering a chain of events that led to CEO Travis Kalanick's ousting. "I wanted to explain that there is a build up to [these things], the culture allows behavior," Brougher says. "The line was crossed when a description of my performance was reduced to my gender. When I complained about the discrimination and was fired four weeks later — that was retaliation."
On Aug. 11, Françoise Brougher v. Pinterest, Inc. was filed in California superior court. And Brougher—after a family meeting with Bill and their three kids—posted an essay on Medium under the headline, "The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity," detailing in clean, spare language her experience at the company.
Like the tweets earlier, her story caught fire. Jack Dorsey retweeted the story; Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, tweeted: "This story from @FrancoiseBr is important showing discrimination against women in the workplace. Françoise is one of the best execs I've worked with so it can happen to anyone." Three days later, Pinterest employees staged their walkout. Says Ozoma, "It was a visceral reaction from employees at a company where employees don't have visceral reactions." The Verge summed up a view gaining traction: "The nicest company in tech is looking pretty mean."
Brougher reached out to meet Ozoma for the first time through mutual friends. Both have an understanding of the complicated intersection of their stories, one that ended with a privileged white woman, already a millionaire, receiving even more millions while the two less senior Black women did not (Ozoma got six months of severance, lost her unvested stock, and is paying COBRA for her insurance; Banks won't disclose her settlement). "I was so proud that my speaking up could lead to the second most powerful person at the company speaking up," says Ozoma. But, "the way history has always worked is that Black women lead a movement and then get left out usually in the telling of it. Thankfully, the history had already been written." Ozoma contacted reporters who didn't acknowledge the intersectionality. "But at the end of the day, my issue has always been with Pinterest and will always be with Pinterest."
"Racism and sexism are intertwined," says Aerica Shimizu Banks, who recalls the impossibility of determining, "is this a racist or sexist thing that happened to me?"
Jared Soares for TIME
Meanwhile, Pinterest spiraled. In September, the Verge reported that a Pinterest finance employee who reviewed payroll data and discovered that Black people at the company were paid less than white counterparts was reprimanded by HR. (Pinterest denied the employee was reprimanded, and said an investigation revealed that the employee's comparators were wrong.) A few weeks before Brougher's settlement announcement, an investor lawsuit was brought by the Employees' Retirement System of Rhode Island, which oversees $8.5 billion in assets. The suit claimed Pinterest executives and board members breached their fiduciary duty by failing to respond to allegations of workplace discrimination. The complaint alleged that the CEO "repeatedly placed himself before the Company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest's White, male leadership clique."
That may have been a trigger for the company to finally act. An internal document reviewed by TIME laid out how the company's chosen public response to a media crisis depends significantly on how severely senior leadership believes a story will impact the stock price.
On Dec. 14, Brougher and Pinterest announced their settlement — minus an NDA. The Information's Lessin says a certain pragmatism may have been at work: "Companies are competing to be the best place to draw the best talent. It used to be jockeying for engineers with free food. Now they have to compete for culture." Though the Guardian reported that Ozoma and Banks felt like the settlement was a "slap in the face," Ozoma clarifies: "Not a slap in the face from Françoise. But a slap from Pinterest because … What is the point of speaking up first and doing all this work, both physical and emotional labor, to then not even be credited properly?" Neither Ozoma nor Banks would receive additional money or hear from Pinterest again.
Pinterest declined to make any executives available for this story. But a spokesperson emailed this statement: "The leadership and employees at Pinterest are committed to a shared goal of building a company we can all be proud of. One that's diverse, equitable and inclusive, where employees feel included and supported. Over the past year, we've made a number of changes to improve our company culture, including revamping our unconscious bias training, more pay and level transparency, developing an employee-led change network, and working to improve representation in our workforce, especially for senior positions."
Brougher has spent the last couple of months between her California home and her childhood hometown in France, hiking and spending time with her family after separately losing both her mother and her father in early 2021. She isn't losing sleep over being marked as a troublemaker. (It's a position she knows she's privileged to be in; Brougher's 2019 compensation at Pinterest was $21.7 million, though 80% of that was tied up in stock grants she lost when she was fired.) Asked whether Silicon Valley companies may be hesitant to hire Brougher in the future, Pichette says, "Not the good ones." Ultimately, during her tenure annual revenue grew from about $500 million to $1.1 billion, and Pichette believes Brougher was largely responsible for much of Pinterest's success today. But she's keeping her options for the future open—whether C-suite or advocacy. Her contributions to /dev/color and the Last Mile Education Fund became the largest individual donation either organization had ever received, and she has created a spreadsheet to study more potential beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, Ozoma and Banks are spearheading a movement. In 2018, in response to the #MeToo movement, California had passed the STAND Act (Stand Together Against Nondisclosure Act) that banned NDAs in cases of sexual harassment, assault and discrimination. But when Ozoma and Banks violated their NDAs, they weren't protected from talking about racial discrimination. "Racism and sexism are intertwined," says Banks, who recalls the impossibility in determining from her experience, "Is this a racist or sexist thing that happened to me?" Through Rukin, Ozoma and Banks reached state senator Connie Leyva, and they drafted the Silenced No More Act. The law would "empower survivors to speak out—if they so wish—so they can hold perpetrators accountable and hopefully prevent abusers from continuing to torment and abuse other workers," Leyva said in a release. If it passes through committee, it will go to the floor for a vote this summer. When asked if Pinterest supports the legislation, a Pinterest spokesperson deflects, emailing that employees, among other internal remedies, can call the company "hotline" to report "inappropriate conduct."
Both women have since launched their own companies: Ozoma started Earthseed, a consulting firm that advises on public policy and, yes, tech accountability; Banks launched Shiso, an advisory and consultant firm around issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in tech. They were gratified to see Pinterest add two Black women to its board. "Black women, whatever comp is being offered, take it," Ozoma says, but "I wish they had gotten on the board without the stink of what happened at Pinterest."
As for the ripple effect, "There is a head on a stake in the middle of the town now," says Pichette. Referring to ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, he says, "The Travises of the world, the VCs … It's now like, 'Travis, you can't do that.' Those days are over." He says boards and bosses now have something to point to. "People can say, 'We're not paying $50 million' because of [your bad behavior]." He believes the Valley's real change will come from startups, where they have a shot at getting it right from the outset, arguing that the biggest companies are "freaking huge aircraft carriers with all the problems of discrimination and everything else, and 150,000 people … once you're up to 30,000 engineers and 20% are women, you will never get out of it." Nextdoor's Friar says, "It is definitely a flag to every company. It's not just a cultural thing. There could be massive business ramifications."
Pinterest's headquarters in San Francisco.
Problems are easier to identify than solutions of course. Since the Pinterest implosion, several tremors have rocked Silicon Valley. Timnit Gebru, a co-leader of Google's Ethical AI team and one of its best-known Black female employees, says she was fired after criticizing the company's lack of progress in hiring women and people of color, something that impacted biases built into AI technology such as facial recognition. A white female AI researcher, Margaret Mitchell, was later fired as well. A colleague in AI tweeted that the company was running a "smear campaign" against the two women. And the U.S. Labor Department recently announced that it was giving up on its class-action suit alleging pay disparities at Oracle withheld $400 million in pay to Black, Asian, Latinx and female workers.
In other words, broken culture remains as ubiquitous as cookies on a computer. "Clearly there's something wrong with the numbers," says Friar, "because there's just no way half the population isn't showing up in half of the slots." Brougher says we will know we have equity "when we see mediocre women getting through the executive ranks because I can tell you there are a ton of mediocre men."
At Pinterest, the stock price recently hit its all-time high. Forbes says Silbermann today is personally worth $4.1 billion. All the managers named in the women's stories remain at Pinterest except for HR lead Jo Dennis. On Nov. 13, four weeks before Brougher's settlement was announced, Dennis sent a note to the Pinterest staff saying that "after 24 years of nonstop work" she had decided to spend more time with her family. Banks calls Dennis "the scapegoat."
"The woman got the blame as usual," says Ozoma. "They should all be held accountable. But you know what? They can never run away from this even when their kids look their names up online. This will always be tied to them. For that, I will forever be grateful to the Internet."
—With reporting by Mariah Espada, Simmone Shah and Julia Zorthian
Correction, March 22:
The original version of this story misstated Brougher's compensation from Pinterest. She received $21.7 million in 2019, but 80% of that was tied up in stock grants she lost when she was fired.
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