You probably think of Silicon Valley as a land of tech moguls and quick fortunes. But a new collection of essays is challenging readers to see another side of California’s iconic boomtown, through the eyes of its factory workers, ice cream cart pushers and metal scrappers. Even a swimming pool installer who predicts who’s going to strike it rich based on the backyard pool.

I go all over Silicon Valley building and demolishing pools. The craziest one I saw was in San Jose, I didn’t even know there were huge homes like that on my side of the city, new money in an old part of town, you know?  Most clients who want their pools demolished, first off, have a dog or two, are over 50, and have kids who have moved out of the house. Those who want a pool built are up and coming. They either have money, or started making lots of it through one of the many jobs now flourishing in the Silicon Valley.

-- Daniel Zapien, pool installer

"Debug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley" bills itself as an “unauthorized diary” of the folks who are struggling to make it in the tech boomtown.

“We took the name debug from high tech,” says Liz Gonzales, who works with the San Jose-based community journalism group DeBug. “When you are putting together a product and it doesn’t pass quality control, you have to send it over to the debug folks. They’re the ones who will figure out the problem, expose it and fix it.”

Gonzales started off on an assembly line, putting together modems 12 hours a day.

“It was soul-crushing. Isolating, and full of insecurity,” says Gonzales. “We were the people creating enormous wealth for a few, but didn’t get to share in that prosperity.”

Gonzales and other workers started the project by collecting first-person stories and publishing them as a magazine.  “We would go out to company parking lots at lunch, looking for people to hand the magazine to,” she says. “And they’d tell us, 'We have a story, too.' ”

The book includes essays from a cook at an elite private school, cellphone salespeople, even housecleaners who clean the houses of rich tech execs.

When I would change the bedsheets, I would wonder if the owners ever thought about the people who changed their sheets while laying in their crisp, clean bed. I wondered if they ever imagined themselves in our shoes. I certainly imagined myself in theirs.

-- Cecilia Chavez, housecleaner

“Although my mother was intelligent enough in Spanish, she couldn’t enter the tech economy unless she was cooking food for the high-tech job market. Metamorphically, she had to enter the industry through the back door that led to the kitchen, to cater to high-tech workers.”

-- Adrian Avila, son of a BBQ chef who had worked a white-collar job for a U.S. company in her native Mexico.

These are also stories of living on the edge: workers earning $60,000 a year but living in their cars, others riding a bus all night to have a place to sleep, or even ending up homeless. That’s what happened to Anthony King, who inspected parts on an assembly line, then lost his job when his employer relocated. He started selling drugs to augment his temp salary.

“Ironically enough, I began selling to the very people who were working in tech,” says King, who eventually was accepted into a housing program after struggling with homelessness for 15 years.

“When people usually think or talk about Silicon Valley, they imagine places like Google and Adobe and Apple,” says King. “But no one thinks about the fact that there are a lot people within the walls of those companies that are struggling every day to just barely make it in this valley.”

“Silicon Valley is a place of stark contradictions and enormous inequality,” adds Gonzales. “The tech industry doesn’t get to dictate the narrative of Silicon Valley. The people doing these jobs -- selling scrap metal, cleaning homes or building pools -- are just as much historians and innovators as Steve Jobs.”