When You Sort It Out, What Kind Of Company Keeps You? In Silicon Valley, There Are Career Slots And Then There Are Bottomless Pits, Stamping Presses And Acid Baths.
 

By

MICHAEL S. MALONE

The San Jose Mercury News

Published: Sunday, November 6, 1988

Section: West

Page: 16
 

Perhaps that is because none of us has that requisite Olympian sang-froid to calmly listen to their answers, then reply, "Well, I’m sorry, son, but the Yankees usually have only one centerfielder per decade and you’re not even the best hitter in your third-grade class;" or, "Yes, but sweetheart, being a nurse means that you will be underpaid, underappreciated, spend half your life zombified by working the graveyard shift and then, if that isn’t enough, you’ll be regularly psychically bruised by emotionally juvenile doctors and chronically selfish patients."

And, if we are unwilling to honestly disabuse our children of their dream careers, how could we ever tell them honestly about the reality of adult work. How shocked we would be if our child, suddenly wiser than we, were to reply to that inevitable question, "Well, Daddy, I’d like to be a cowboy, but I suspect I’ll become a frustrated middle manager in charge of wafer fab at a second-tier semiconductor company."

We would be surprised because we are unwilling to admit that reality to ourselves. Nobody dreams of growing up to be an advertising executive, or a supervisor of accounts receivable?or, for that matter, a free-lance writer. We end up there because, as in a coin sorter, the tens of millions of us in the workforce separate out into the available slots. There are thousands of these slots, but only a handful of really good ones: business tycoon, U.S. senator, best-selling author, famous surgeon, prize-winning scientist, rock star, movie queen and, because these slots are so shallow, they fill up much faster than the rest. Frankly, that is probably for the best, because most of us never have to face the fact that our coin wouldn’t have fit.

So, we march on. The rent or mortgage still has to be paid, the car payments made, food put on the table, and stainless steel wired to little Susie’s molars. We take a job . . . and we dream of what might have been. And then we scheme ways to make the career we’ve found more fulfilling, more rewarding. Ambition colors our lives an all-consuming, fundamental ambition to somehow reach a better slot. This ambition is a universal disease. Politicians dream of becoming president, priests of being named pope, apparatchiks of becoming commisar, commoners of being crowned king.

But I digress . . . in fact, this entire article thus far has been one long digression. It’s just that when one speaks of work, it always comes back to dream versus reality, to envy and ambition. But most of all, it comes back to self.

This is understandable, but also deadly. Too often we are so busy contemplating our splendid selves, congratulating ourselves over some minor, meaningless victory ("The Boss remembered my name! My future is made.") or chastising ourselves over some inexplicable defeat ("The Boss forgot my name! I’m human trash. I think I’ll kill myself.") that we fail to look around. More often than not, that is where our real problem lies.

The Job. The Company you work for. We shed a tear over Dickens’ horrific workhouses, then fail to notice that our own company makes Scrooge & Marley seem like Club Med; or that, next to our boss, Fagin is Mother Teresa.

The fact is that there are career slots and then there are bottomless pits, stamping presses and acid baths. The same job that at one firm is like a gentle barge cruise down the Nile at another can be a screaming barrel ride over Niagara Falls. Your boss at one place may have the concern, dignity and tactical wisdom of Robert E. Lee, while at another be as monstrous, perverse and drug-addled as Hermann W. Goering. Yet both hold the same title and the same rule over your fate.

We’re not just talking high-tech companies, either. The Silicon Valley Psychopathia is widely infectious: from restaurants to car dealerships to hotels to this newspaper, all of us are cursed with hyper-extended workweeks and the mindless taskmaster of technologic change. You no longer have to be an M.S.-E.E. to suffer.

This article is designed to be a ladder?a rickety, crooked one at that to help all of us climb above the roar and dust of our everyday lives and get some perspective over what it means to work in Silicon Valley; of the various forms the companies out there take. This article (primarily because the author has no job to be fired from, only years of vilification and personality assassination to look forward to) will not only describe each of the corporate types that make up Silicon Valley, but, thanks to the recommendations from various valley headhunters (who should know better than anyone else), will actually list those companies that best fit each category.

You will note that some firms appear in several categories. Others have changed categories over the years. Still others, defeated by the valley, have all but moved away. But if there is one truth to Silicon Valley, it is that, like bad pennies, old companies and old names forever resurface. Forewarned is foreresume’d.
 
 

THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
 
 

"I shall push the enemy to the wall."

The model for this kind of company is the Union Army of the Potomac at the beginning of the Civil War, which, with limitless supplies, fancy new uniforms, and a plentitude of officers and soldiers, was regularly whacked by a rag-tag Confederate Army half its size. But boy, could it ever march.

Silicon Valley regularly sees spanking new companies pop up with plans to take on the world. Typically, they are backed by some giant East Coast corporation. And equally typically, they are run by some former v.p. of finance or sales. Up goes the fancy building, out come the canapes for the distinguished visitors to the open house, in goes the Hermann Miller furniture, up go the pompous predictions of success, out (six months late) goes the first product, down goes the corporate stock, out go half of the employees (whose only crimes were loyalty and having worked hard for an incompetent management), back goes the new Silicon Valley division to the East Coast, and up goes the For Lease sign on the fancy building.

Oh, and lest we forget: down goes the county employment rate and out extends the line at the Employment Development Department. For an epitaph, all those jobs and all those dreams wind up as a "Write-off for Discontinued Operations" in the back pages of the next corporate annual report?right next to a salary increase for company directors for a job well done.

But hey, thank you for your support.

How to Spot:

Corporate limousines for the honchos. Too many Ferrari models in executive offices. Executive dining room. Glossy divisional newsletter. General manager is a CPA or former national sales manager. Visiting corporate CEO says "Silicone." Equipment in R&D lab still has shipping labels after six months. 80-pound matte finish 100 percent rag off-white stationary. General manager and most of the top staff live in San Francisco. Introduction date of first product is bumped three times and no one has been canned.

Examples:

Atari (under Warner, 1977-81), Bell Industries, Eaton Equipment Operations Division, Eaton Mircrowave Products, GCA Corp. IC Systems Group, GE/Space Systems, GenRad, Gould AMI, GTE, Harris Corp. and Farinon Division, ITT (Qume/Information Systems), McDonnell-Douglas, Motorola/Four Phase, NCR Micrographics Systems, Northern Telecom, Olivetti Advanced Tech Center, Schlumberger, Teledyne MEC, 3M, Tymnet.

BEDFORD FALLS
 
 

"Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself as an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?"
 
 

The title comes from the most evil and dangerous movie ever made: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. You remember: Jimmy Stewart discovers that his life wasn’t rendered meaningless because he stayed in his home town. On the contrary, in a dream he learns that had he never been born, sweet Bedford Falls would have become evil Potterville.

Sure. This disgusting corporate propaganda is jammed down our throats along with the other turkey every Christmas. In reality, what pretends to be a good-hearted little morality tale about personal responsibility and community is actually a pernicious attempt to enforce career conformity. It really says: Stick with your job, no matter how much you hear the siren call of adventure, no matter how disappointed you are with yourself, because trust us--in the end you’ll be proven right.

In fact, the more you watch It’s a Wonderful Life the more you realize the real hero is party-girl Gloria Grahame, who makes her own rules, kicks up her round heels . . . and when things grow too hot, gets the hell out of Dodge. And on the bank’s money to boot.

There are a number of companies in Silicon Valley that resemble the idyllic small-town life of Bedford Falls. The most famous, of course, is the Country Club itself, Hewlett-Packard Co. H-P is a corporation of scoutmasters and Little League coaches, Mormon elders and just generally nice, hard-working, impossibly decent human beings. Not only will they never lose their jobs, but frankly, they never should. All will proudly wear their 30-year pins at their retirement dinners. This is marzipan land.

For those who fit, of course. The ugly little secret of companies like H-P is that it is a wonderful life only for those who conform. If you have even the slightest desire to occasionally walk the noisy sidewalks of Potterville, such a place as Bedford Falls can be an endless torture. That’s why the most creative, independent employees of H-P, like Steve Wozniak, have always left. Not driven out, mind you, these companies are too damned decent for that; it’s just the growing gut sense that you simply don’t belong, that your psychic fly is down. That’s why the quote above comes not from the movie, but from Sinclair Lewis. You see, hidden behind every Bedford Falls is not something as obvious as Potterville, but rather the smug, intolerant rectitude of Main Street’s Gopher Prairie.

Hey, Gloria! Wait for me!

How to Spot:

Top execs eating in the employee cafeteria. Absurdly high employee satisfaction ratings. Low turnover and long employment waiting lists. Friday beer busts that don’t turn bitter. Casual dress on Fridays. Morning doughnut and fruit breaks. Prayer groups. Holiday Open House nights. Bike paths and par courses. A too-normal chief executive.

Examples:

Apple (1985-87), Ask Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Software Publishing, Sun Microsystems, Syntex, Rolm (pre-IBM), Tandem, Triad.
 
 
 

THE S.S. PEQUOD
 
 

"Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round the Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men!

To chase that white whale on both sides of the Earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."
 
 

This is the company that initially seems like a wonderful cruise line until little clues begin to give you the gnawing fear that there is a demented, obsessed captain in control of the tiller and that you have booked passage on a Death Ship from Hell.

What is so frightening about this kind of company is that in the early stages it is almost completely indistinguishable from a hot start-up that soon will be a household word and make everybody involved rich beyond their greatest fantasies. After all, no sane person would stay in this valley without the prospect of becoming a tycoon. So, we stick with these little corporate nuthouses, these Silicon Valley versions of Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, because we want to believe they will pan out and all the insanity will have been worth it.

And so, as we watch the company CEO begin to wear only white (Ampex) or soak

his feet in the men’s room toilet (Apple) or code-name prototypes after well-built female employees (Atari) or slowly become a mad Ahab pacing the quarterdeck on his ivory leg, we keep whispering to ourselves, "Be cool, be cool, don’t worry about it. I mean, entrepreneurs are supposed to be a little flaky. Right? Right?" And secretly, we pray that ours won’t be the fate of poor Ishmael, the Pequod’s sole surviving orphan, clinging to a flotsam coffin in the middle of a great lonely ocean.

How to Spot:

Explanations of the founder’s eccentric behavior as, "Well, he is a genius, after all." A meeting in which an exec makes a statement so wacky that you start to laugh?only to discover that everyone else in the room is taking notes. Wholesale revamping of job titles ("area associate" for "secretary") and other forms of social engineering (such as calling everyone by his or her first name) to create a spurious notion of equality. An inverted dress code, in which the subordinate exhibits a better wardrobe than the boss. A personnel philosophy that places the corporate "family" before one’s own. The eerie sense that you have not joined a company, but a Glorious Cause.

Examples:

Adobe Systems, Apple (under Steve Jobs), Ampex (under Alexander Poniatoff),

AMD (when Jerry Sanders was in the trenches), Atari (under Nolan Bushnell),

Chips and Technologies, Convergent, Cypress Semiconductor, Intel (under Andy

Grove), LSI Logic, Maxtor, Measurex, Nanometrics (when Vincent Coates is running the place), National Semiconductor (as long as Charles Sporck’s in charge), Pizza Time Theater (in its heyday), Raychem, Seagate, Sigma Designs, Tandon, Televideo, Wyse.
 
 
 

MODERN TIMES
 
 

"Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron;
thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
Be wise now therefore, O ye kings:
be instructed, ye judges of the earth."

One of the interesting features of the human imagination is that our worst nightmares rarely come true, but that our nicest dreams usually do and turn out to be even worse.

Fifty years ago, sociologists, labor leaders and futurists all bleakly predicted that the fate of the average American man would be that of Modern Times, as an exploited assembly worker, Taylor Planned into a mindless automaton and ground up by the heartless industrial machine. Wouldn’t it be so much finer, they said with a sigh, if each of us could work in handsome, clean buildings, in our own private work cubicles, performing felicitous tasks of the mind and not the body, and calling one another by our first names. It was enough to bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened Wobbly.

Well, folks, we got our wish. What the dreamers forgot to consider was that these newfangled factories could be as stressful, totalitarian, exhausting and physically ruinous as a West Virginia coal mine. At least, down there in the dust of a coal mine, as long as the work got done, you could allow your natural personality to shine through. Try that in the scrubbed air of some Silicon Valley tilt-up corporation.

Of course, we did the decent thing and opened up the opportunity to women. Now, we all can participate in the workforce and enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution: quadruple bypass surgery, Valium, Cokenders, and Porsche leasing programs.

The great bugaboo of past reformists was the quota system. Who can forget the poor Tramp, so dazed from torquing down bolts on the assembly line that that he uses the wrench to tighten parts of the foreman’s anatomy? Thank God we got rid of quotas! Of course, we’ve replaced that with Innovation, which means that now you have to beat the competition not only at the end of the month, but well into the next century.

Ah, Progress! It used to be only nations that were wrecked in the name of an idea. One wonders if high schoolers of the future will study the 80-hour workweeks, the divorces and drug abuse, the pathological struggle to stay on "the leading edge" that make up the fabric of Silicon Valley life, and recoil with the same horror we do reading the horrors of the Packingtown plant in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle?

"But why," the teen-ager will ask, "Did people stay?"

"I don’t know," his parents will reply, "I guess people just didn’t know any better back then."

How To Spot:

Glandular, even chromosomal, fear of what "the Japanese are up to." Full parking lots at lunchtime. Sunday morning meetings. Simpering reverence for technical types. Abuse of anyone in a staff position. Corporate newsletters that devote more space to new products than to people. A sizable percentage of the employee population that speaks Japanese or Hindi. The need to wear a bunny suit when entering half of the company’s buildings. Occasional evacuations and/or lawsuits over toxics leaks. A chief executive with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, chemistry or computer science. A complete product line that would neatly fit into a briefcase with room left for a bag lunch.

Examples:

Amdahl, Chips & Technologies, Claris, Cypress Semiconductor, Intel, KLA Instruments, LSI Logic, Maxtor, National Semiconductor, Plexus, Pyramid, Seeq, Sun Microsystems, Tandy/ Grid, 3COM, Tencor, VLSI.
 
 
 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
 
 

"I have dreamed of man’s state, of this courteous and enlightened socialstate; behind which, in the temple, the horrible blood-sacrifice was consummated.

Were they, these children of the sun, so sweetly courteous to each other in silent recognition of that horror?"
 
 

In the Thomas Mann novel that bears the title of this section is a scene in which Hans Castorp, a tuberculosis patient staying in a Swiss sanitorium, goes out hiking in the Alpine snow only to find himself trapped in a storm and dazed with the cold. In his delirium, he imagines himself in a paradise on Earth, where beautiful people cavort in a garden- like setting. As he explores this Elysium, he comes across a temple. Curious, he enters . . . to find two old witches ritually murdering an infant: the hidden cost of the perfection outside.

It is no small irony that some of the best employers in this valley, the most people-oriented, benevolent companies around, are built upon a dark and dreary foundation.

The most obvious examples are the firms that build weapons and their delivery systems. However one feels about the military and defense, to devote one’s life specifically to building instruments of destruction is bound to induce occasional twinges of doubt as, conversely, should a career spent hiding from one’s responsibility to defend one’s family, country and beliefs.

Of course, it is always easy to pick on military contractors while one blithely spends 10 hours a day designing video games to implode the brains of America’s youth, or developing ad campaigns to manipulate people into acquiring products they don’t need, or sitting in board meetings discussing how to hide the upcoming company stock crash from all those thousands of fixed-income retiree shareholders out there or, for that matter, discussing how to dismiss a lifetime of work in a few paragraphs of newsprint.

So don’t think about it. Enjoy the beautiful day, the ripened fruit, the fragrant flowers. And if you hear any noises coming from the temple, just tell yourself it’s the wind, the wind.

How to Spot:

Defense: Descriptions of company products that never address precisely what they do or what they’re good for. Class-action suits by consumers or shareholders. Ongoing unionization efforts. Classified areas. Regular EPA inspections. A general unwillingness on your part to tell strangers what you do for a living. An intermittent desire to give it all up and go work as a volunteer in a homeless shelter.

Consumer: A tendency to justify one’s work with: "So what’s wrong with people having a little fun?" or "Whatsamatter, didn’t you play with toy guns when you were kid?" or "I think it’s good that kids have a place to go?" "It's certainly better than having them running around on the streets" or "It’s important for a child to have a healthy imaginary life; it’s the job of the parents to make sure it doesn’t become unhealthy."

Examples:

Activision, Acurex, Applied Technology, Argo Systems, Atari, Delfin Systems, Elsin, ESL, GE/Space, GTE Government Systems, Litton, Lockheed Missiles & Space, Maxim Technologies, Rolm Mil-Spec, Systems Control, TRW Microwave, Ultrasytems, Worlds of Wonder.
 

THE BERLIN BUNKER
 
 

"His existence became one of isolation and remoteness, his resolution, above all in his cartomania?spending hours studying maps already rendered out of date by the march of war, and issuing orders for the taking of a tiny bridge or pillbox, often by imaginary soldiers . . . "
 
 

I thought about calling this the Seventh Calvary. You know: "We’ll just ride down the hill and kick some Sioux butt." But our century has provided us a more appropriate image. This is the company that is in terrible straits yet won’t admit it to itself. While artillery rounds explode overhead, down in the corporate bunker middle-managers still dream of glorious campaigns to come; of hot new products that will regain all of the lost markets. Meanwhile, out on the streets, the line workers and secretaries fight savagely house-to-house for a cause no one has told them is already lost.

Where does such self-delusion come from? The top, of course. The executives have no such fantasies. They read the sales numbers, they see the analysts’ reports. They know the company is doomed--that’s why they put their resumes out on the street three months ago. As they exhort the troops to fight to the last man for the Fatherland, they are standing with one foot through the hatch of the submarine that will take them (and their gold) to Paraguay.

A friend of mine once applied for a job at a local defense electronics company. The interview went well, the unctuous v.p. of personnel explaining why the firm was such a wonderful place to work, until my friend was asked if he had any questions. "Yes," he replied, "if this is such a well-run place and if your products are so competitive, why have you been losing money for the last three quarters?"

The v.p. blanched, then grew angry. "Obviously," he replied through clenched teeth, "You are not a team player." The magical two-word kiss of death. Interview over.

Two weeks later that same v.p. took a job at another company. For more pay.

Most of the people he hired were laid off.

How to Spot:

A president’s letter in the company newsletter that includes quotes like, "We’ve had some setbacks, but we’re coming out of it." An early retirement party in the personnel department on the day you interview. Signs and posters in the lobby proclaiming "Welcome to the XYZ Co. Family!" A seething company-wide paranoia about the terrible things being said about it in the press. A growing number of stock analysts that no longer cover the firm. An annual report that de-emphasizes lousy financial figures to focus on "The Wonderful People Who Make up XYZ Inc." No overtime, no business trips, no seminars,except, of course, for company execs.

Examples:

Convergent Tech, Corvus, Daisy Systems, Diasonics, Memorex, Televideo, Worlds of Wonder.

BEYOND THE INNER STATION
 
 

"The Horror! The Horror!"
 
 

Both of you English majors out there will recognize the title of this section from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By the way, what are you people doing in Silicon Valley? There’s no work for you here. Run away! Run away! Beyond the Inner Station was where Kurtz ran his evil empire, a sort of Fortune 500 business in ivory and slaves, where employees’ heads typically wound up on poles around the lobby.

The companies of this category exist in the seventh circle of corporate inferno. Abandon all hope ye who are hired here.

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy (you still there, English majors?) all happycompanies are the same; but all unhappy companies are unhappy in their ownway. Thus, each of the companies from Beyond the Inner Station, thecompanies that fill the Infernal Industrial Park, reached their presentdecadence along their own unique paths. Some were just born bad--bad VentureCapital genes perhaps, or maybe the founders were frightened by a ghostwhile the company was being born. Others were once goodcompanies, but havebeen hijacked by a cabal of bad men. Others, facing the horrors of competition have just snapped, gone over to the Dark Side, embraced the Great Satan of survival at all costs--even if it means shipping mainframes to Dubrovnik in boxes marked Lee Press-On Nails.

Working for a company from Beyond the Inner Station is something you never quite get over, akin to the rare, but unforgettably chilling experience of meeting a true psychopath. Companies like these are not the raw material for amusing anecdotes years hence. Rather, they are the blank few months in your job history you never, ever want to talk about. These are places so palpably malevolent that within minutes after arriving you sense that something truly awful is going to happen  --and maybe to you.

You’ll notice I’m not being funny here. That’s because I’ve gotten the phone calls from employees on the verge of nervous breakdowns, talked with executives who have been hidden in hotel rooms waiting to turn state’s evidence before a grand jury, and most of all, seen the set mouths and frightened eyes of the survivors. I also got sued once by one of these companies for $1 million (well, actually, it was me and the Mercury News, but that’s close enough, believe you me), so don’t expect to see below the names of companies that still exist -- at least not until I can get my few meager assets put in my cat’s name.

How to Spot:

Extremely limited access to the shipping room and loading dock on certain days. Line workers who disappear every time a government vehicle drives up. Late-night meetings between company executives. Foreign engineers who have been promised extraordinary bonuses. Almost no attention by the press or analysts for a firm its size. Government inspectors taken for long lunches. Visibly frightened female employees. High wages combined with no prepared materials on company benefits. Hints of drugs on executive row.

Examples:

Atari (under Warner), Commodore (up to 1984), II Industries, Solfan, Therma-Wave.
 
 

THE LONGEST RUNNING SHOW ON BROADWAY
 
 

You know how it goes: Some musical or play gets all the big reviews from the New York papers, sold-out houses for months and months, a Tony or two, and fame and glory for its stars. But by the time you finally get to Broadway to see the thing, or it arrives out here in a road show, the sets are cheap and the principal players long gone. You end up with Red Buttons instead of Kevin Kline, Eve Arden instead of Bernadette Peters.

So it is with many Silicon Valley companies, including some of the most successful. The days when their reputations were made as dynamic, iconoclastic, cheeky corporate mavericks are long gone. The famous founder, the subject of endless memorable anecdotes, got booted out of the firm long ago and is now running a competitor down the street. The hirsute, besandled computer jockeys that changed the world have been supplanted by intense, slick GQ clones with MBAs. The only thing that survives is that cute little logo, and, of course, the cynical ads that continue to play off the company’s old image.

But don’t be disappointed. Actually, the old firm was a place of runaway egos, fistfights in the hallways and gut- churning chaos. By comparison, the new firm is predictable, safe and prosperous. And though, for all of its faults, you would have happily given your life for the old company; the new company you will come to hate with every cell in your body.

How to Spot:

Company publications, posters, even museums, cherishing the memory of a founder who long ago was driven away. The executive of a competing firm who happens to have the same last name as this company. People in company ads who look nothing like people who work at the company. Testy replies like, "Yeah, that’s true, but I’d rather be working for the company these days." or "Sure, we’ve had a great past, but this company’s future is just as exciting." Company logo window or bumper stickers. Adults who identify with the company in the embarrassing manner of children with rock groups. A sort of Soviet paranoia about Evil Giant Competitors ever ready to destroy this Peaceful Little Kingdom. Headquarters in the Stanford Industrial Park or on Ellis Street in Mountain View. A new company president who knows nothing about electronics but more than any human should about retailing.

Examples:

Acurex, Advanced Micro Devices/MMI, Anderson-Jacobson, Apple (1988), Avantek, Calma, Coherent, Crystal Tech, Diffraction Optics, Elma Engineering, Failure Analysis Associates, Granger Associates, GVO, Hewlett-Packard, Kaptron, Micro Mask, Pearson Electronics, Precision Monolithics, Ramtek, SEMI Inc., Siltec, Spectra-Physics, Syva, Teledyne Semi, Varian, Watkins-Johnson.
 

CORPORATE LAPUTA
 
 

"Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevil, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect ariseth from the contempt they bear for practical geometry; which they despise as vulgar and mechanick, those instructions they give being too refined for the intellecks of their workmen; which occasions perpetual mistakes."
 
 

These are companies that have taken the Silicon Valley philosophy to its logical conclusion: They are so far out on the leading edge they’ve fallen off. The title and quote come from Gulliver’s Travels, of a people so intellectualized and out-of-it that they had to be escorted by assistants who regularly hit them with bladders filled with pebbles to remind them speak or listen. (Swift, you may notice, also had a way with Spanish puns.)

One only has to peruse the trade press to appreciate that Silicon Valley is filled with companies working in technologies so arcane that one doubts even they can understand them. These Laputans take several forms:
1) Established companies that announce new products that will never, ever see the light of day. These firms (and their name is legion) are moderately interesting as examples of business fraud and can be found in almost every category in this list, but typically are in the software business -- which isn’t particularly real in the first place.

How to Spot:

New product announcements that contain no information on price or delivery. Stunned reactions by industry leaders over the announcement, followed a few days later (after apparently considerable research) by a certain smugness. Profound quiet thereafter from the company making the announcement.

2) Companies operating in fringe or niche markets only they seem to understand or want to participate in. As reporters rarely understand what they do, they are rarely mentioned in the press  -- often making their sheer size a surprise even to valley veterans.

How to Spot:

Any company in microwave products or linear devices. Firms that are hiring when everybody else is in deep recessionary despair and layoffs. Regular appearances in trade magazines you’ve never heard of. Engineers still at the forefront of their profession after age 35. Non-appearance in local newspaper business sections except on the stock page.

Examples:

Advanced Decision Systems, ARACOR, Avantek, Beta Phase, California Microwave, Linear Technology, MIPs.

3) Research laboratories. These are places designed from the start to be essentially worthless, their products typically being very expensive reports that few read and no one ever puts into action. One positive side-effect, however, is that these institutions (in every sense of that word) keepcollege professors and doctoral candidates away from both undergraduates andreal corporations, where they may do considerable harm.

How to Spot:

Research reports that look suspiciously like old dissertations with new title pages. Research projects that don’t quite match what you paid for. An unsafe level of Stanford Ph.D.s in the hard sciences. Government contracts that aren’t put up for bid. Scores of apparently intelligent people not actually doing anything. General college faculty-like contempt for secretaries, clerical staffers and any others who make productive use of their time. KQED window stickers on Volvos.

Examples:

SRI, Xerox PARC

4) Companies that never actually do anything. These firms are intriguing because one senses that their executives actually believe they are working on something important. The founders meet and scheme, write business plans and in time actually convince venture capitalists to put up millions of dollars. Then they rent a building, put a company sign out front, and set about filling the place with people and equipment. In every way, they are a perfect copy of a real, producing company. And yet, nothing happens. They fall into themselves, dry up and blow away like chaff on the fiscal winds. Employees, who until the day before had been told everything was going just great, stand in the parking lot, stare at the For Lease sign, and wonder what just hit them.

The most amazing thing about these introverted, ill-fated companies -- the most famous being Trilogy -- is that when it’s all over, the realization suddenly hits everybody that the project was doomed from the start. Like the Laputan scientist trying to breed hairless sheep, these companies all suffer from some fundamental flaw in their plan, be it technology, product, marketor management. Some are almost touching in the immense amount of time, money and sweat they expend, none of which forestalls oblivion by as much as millisecond.

Touching, of course, unless you’ve been suckered into working there.

How To Spot:

Unwarranted optimism in the face of new competition. Regular daily visits from sober-looking venture capitalists and bankers. Sudden disconnection of the phone system or cut-off of power. Yellowing drawing of the planned product in the lobby. Execs prone to extended reminiscences or telling you how much they "appreciate your loyalty to the company." No product brochures, no product data sheets, no product. Sudden talk about a new direction for the company.

Examples:

Machine Intelligence, Ridge Computers, Tolerant Systems, Trilogy.
 
 

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS
 

Just as George Lucas’ Star Wars was a flashy knock-off of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, so too by comparison do American high-tech companies seem clever and shallow next to their mysterious and complex Japanese counterparts. Equally, the tiny outposts of Japanese firms we see in Silicon Valley can disguise mega-corporations at home.

Discovering just what these outposts are all about can be a challenge even to the Americans who work for them. Some are here to help set up local distribution programs; others to stake out U.S. manufacturing in case we finally get tired of their predatory behavior and set up tariff barriers. Still others exist primarily to hire us locals to suck our brains out. What may seem like a good-paying gig and a safe haven from the next valley downturn may turn out to be Nightmare on First Street. That’s particularly true for women, whom many Japanese executives consider to be slightly less evolved than office plants.

So don’t say you haven’t been warned. After all, our equivalent characters in The Hidden Fortress, the one on which R2D2 and C3PO are based, happen to be slaves.

On the other hand, if the job does turn out great, each night before you go to bed, be sure to remind yourself, as a citizen, of just how much you are doing to help America compete against its greatest threat since . . . well, Japan.

How to Spot:

You’ve got to be kidding. And don’t let the "America" or USA in the name fool you.

Examples:

Fuji Optical, Fujitsu America, Konica USA, Matsushita, NEC, Oki Semi, Ricoh, Seiko (Circuits, Instruments), Sony Technologies Center, Toshiba. (Also, for future reference: Samsung and Hyundai.)
 
 

LIFE ON PLUTO
 
 

Many of these companies once themselves burned brightly, but have cooled into torpor. Others were dead from the beginning, having found a nice safe corner to build a nest and sink right into eternal hibernation.

There is nothing especially wrong with these companies. In places like Detroit and Philadelphia they make up the majority. But here in Silicon Valley, where everything moves as twice the normal pace, these joints as a close as you can get to Night of the Living Dead -- the kind of places you only admit to working at if you can endure nervous coughs.

Now don’t get me wrong. Corporate retirement villages are a crucial niche in this area’s ecology. After all, Silicon Valley eats its old. Betray a little human weakness, show a wrinkle here or there, ask to cut your workweek down to six days, and the next thing you know the tribe has left you on the far side of the river with two pieces of flat bread and a prayer wheel.

That’s when you, an aging Silicon Valley courtesan, show up at the front door of one of these companies, pleased to know that there still exist firms that will love you for your experience, not your energy.

How To Spot:

"Years with the Company" lists that take up most of the corporate newsletter. A majority of the employees owning their own homes. Electric typewriters. Enclosed offices. White short- sleeve shirts. Weekly retirement parties and regular return visits by those who’ve left. Greater interest in profit-sharing than in new products. Bikinied women and ‘50s-style layouts in corporate ads. Regular non-appearance of the company’s name in trade journals. Metal furniture. A company name without a prefix like sili-, in-, trans-, super- or semi-; or a suffix like -tron, -tronics, -ics, or -ix. A company history book that’s already out of date. Anyone with the title "emeritus."

Examples:

Ampex, Beckman Instruments, Fairchild (under Schlumberger), FMC, Ford Aerospace, General Instruments, GTE Government Systems, Intersil, Litton Applied Tech, Memorex, Perkin-Elmer, Raytheon, Signetics, Siliconix, Tab Products, Varian, Velo- Bind, Versatec, Watkins-Johnson, Westinghouse.

There you have it. You have now been vouchsafed the real company secrets of Silicon Valley.

But a warning, gentle reader:

Remember the lesson of Plato’s Cave. In the land of shadow and illusion, you have been given the opportunity to climb out into the light and see this place for what it truly is. But when you return to the corporate cave tomorrow morning, do not tell your workmates what you’ve learned. Don’t turn to the person at the next desk and loudly announce, "You know, this place really sucks." Such philosophical honesty may result in your living in a damp cardboard box under the San Fernando Street overpass and wearing somebody else’s underwear. Just keep your mouth shut and remember: Given the present state of Social Security, you can never, ever retire.

So good luck! And don’t forget to pad that next job application.