Silicon Follies Open ebook - 2001

Excerpt

Chapter One: Adrift Among The Cubicles

It was a sea of cubicles. Every twenty yards an oversized potted palm rose up like a desert island, a cluster of upholstered chairs marooned and huddling at the base. High overhead, box-girders braced up a brooding sheet-metal sky. Banks of lighting hovered at regular intervals, regiments of incandescent clouds. All natural light had been banished.

Once it had been a manufacturing plant, but the waning of the aerospace business had pressed it into other uses. Now it was a thought factory. The industrial designers' attempts to humanize the anonymous, cavernous space had only made it more surreal.

Aesthetics weren't the only problem. The leviathan imposed a number of logistical challenges, foremost of which was the Question of Caffeine: what happened when one hundred thousand square feet of personnel simultaneously converged on a common area for coffee? What would such a concentration of volatile, under-socialized engineers, passive-aggressive managers and other assorted hard-charging corporate over-achievers yield?

Management decided such a critical mass wouldn't be in its best interests. It didn't like the sound of all those lost man-hours spent walking back and forth, either. But this was the Silicon Valley: coffee wasn't just the ordinary cup of joe; this was vente-double-macchiato-with-an-almond-shot country. Labor-intensive, gourmet coffee beverages, in every conceivable roasted mutation and international variation, were standard corporate perks. You could lose engineering talent without viable coffee options; they'd wander off-site to Starbuck's for a jolt. Sometimes they wouldn't come back, recruited away by a company that gave caffeine its proper consideration.

So management declared the coffee must come to them; rolling espresso carts, masts flying café-style awnings, piloted by captain coffee-jerks, navigated the cubicle sea like Chinese junks.

It was with this gravity of purpose that the coffee man jibed down aisle 4N. As he approached his usual stop, the electronic chime announced his arrival.

Rumpled-looking young men emerged blinking from their cubicles like rodents flushed from their burrows.

"What'll it be?" barked the coffee man.

"Double latte," one engineer called back. "Single mocha, vanilla shot," ordered another. The hissing of the espresso machine commenced.

Paul Armstrong did not emerge from his cubicle, though the fragrance of brewing beans called out to him. He furrowed his brow, peering into his terminal at a lump of code in curly brackets.

He was looking for a leak. Somewhere in this tangle of a strange and foreign alphabet, bits were leaking out. Deep within the guts of this binary beast, something wasn't sealed tightly enough -- logically speaking -- and tiny atoms of information flew off unpredictably into the digital ether.

Of course, this minute and trivial defect meant that the whole system would melt itself into a pool of logical slag at totally random intervals. Not only was this generally bad for morale, it was making his project manager inconsolably cranky.

He sat motionless for several minutes, just staring, then gingerly added a few keystrokes he feebly hoped might plug the hole. More staring. His hands flashed across the keyboard, initiating yet another iteration of the compile cycle, this time with the addition of some obscure "flags" and "arguments" -- desperate twists and variations on the same old compiler operation. He didn't really expect it to work, but the time it took to execute would buy him a moment before the coffee rolled away and his debugging resumed in earnest.

Not a moment too soon; coffeeman was preparing to set sail for other ports. As Paul waited for his own double latte, he was drawn into a chat with one of his project members. He listened as his colleagues speculated on the project's shortcomings.

"I'm telling you, man, it's down in the presentation layer," one particularly earnest programmer geeked. "This is asynch, baby, and you know we don't do asynch worth a damn yet. X.25 is not TCP/IP, and it sure as hell isn't SNA, either." He turned to Paul. "You know that as well as I do, Armstrong -- you wanna back me up here?"

Paul tried to conjure up some useful response, and failed. He gamely contorted his face into a suitably thoughtful shape, and groped to say something that would have suggested he'd even been paying attention. But he felt...distracted -- by a persistent notion, the same moldering misgiving which of late had become the backdrop of his career:

This wasn't what he had expected to be doing with this life.

Five years had passed since Paul graduated with a degree in journalism. And here he was -- slumped in front of a terminal, debugging an error-handling routine using a debugger that itself was full of bugs, on a product that would probably never see a customer.

His title was consultant.

How had this happened? How, after preparing for a career in letters and culture (and secretly dreaming of writing the Great American Novel), had he ended up as an engineer, enmeshed in an endless dialog with the cold complexity of idiot-savant machine logic?

He retraced the steps derailing his literary career: a boyhood friendship with Steve -- a socially backward, withdrawn, gangly delinquent with a destructive curiosity and a talent for re-engineering the telephone system. Paul and his adolescent pal had electronically journeyed -- with a little help from the parts department at Radio Shack -- from the rotary-dialed telephone on his mother's kitchen wall to the central switch for their Northern California suburb.

Then there was his natural quantitative inclinations, unbidden but insistent. After Paul demonstrated a knack for geometric proofs, a high school math teacher insisted he join the school's computer club. A class in formal logic fulfilled a dreaded science requirement at his university.

Then, in his first real job as a research assistant at a Santa Clara County newspaper, he salvaged an editor's work -- presumed lost forever -- from the minicomputers linking the paper to the wire services. It was simple for Paul, having cultivated an understanding of the literal-mindedness of digital machinery.

But it had impressed his boss, and led to an immediate promotion. His shiny new title -- senior systems analyst -- and the twofold increase in pay had deferred his attention from the fact that his career had taken an irrevocable turn from the life in the humanities toward the life of machines.

That was 1990. Just the beginning of the explosion. The Silicon Valley was already well established as a hotbed of electronic enterprise, but sometime in the late 80s, things had gotten way out of hand. Overnight, it seemed, computers had emerged from the hermetic world of scientists, defense contractors, Ma Bell, and geek hobbyists, and suddenly became everyone else's business, too.

Technical talent was suddenly in vogue. If you could even spell COBOL, Pascal, or -- especially -- C, you became the object of relentless attention by technical recruiters. They would track you down, buy you a series of expensive lunches, and pledge to triple your paycheck.

After a few months in his new position, the recruiters had zeroed in on Paul, too. He was happy to give in; after all, how was pushing bits for a newspaper any different from pushing bits for a software or semiconductor outfit? Besides, technology companies were much more flush-and-plush than publishers -- way better perks, rapidly escalating pay.

But what had really set the stage for his incipient malaise was the day he became a Believer: the day, convinced that XYZ Corp's newest "insanely great" technology would change the world (he could barely remember what it was now, and neither could the world), he signed up with the fledgling startup -- in exchange for stock options.

Paul had toiled there for three years of eighty-hour weeks. Then, on the eve of the IPO, management accepted a takeover offer, leaving employee options high and dry.

That had wrecked him. Not financially, of course; he had been paid reasonably even without stock options. But he'd never Believe again. After that he insisted on the money up-front, at an hourly rate, as a private consultant. A black hat. A mercenary.

Which is how he found himself here, in this cubicle, with his hands over his eyes, shaking his head: tired, well off, twenty-eight years old, adrift.

Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Scoville