I was on a conference call for a company I help out that’s based in San Francisco. We have people all over the world — England, Australia, Hong Kong, Czechoslovakia, plus the West and East Coasts of the United States — and a number of them were on the call. It was just before Thanksgiving, and an English participant mentioned to the group that the average American Thanksgiving dinner costs $48. The San Francisco people went off the rails, saying (I say boasting) the $48 does not even feed one person at their Thanksgiving dinners. That made me think how different lives can be.
I had started reading “The Phoenix Project,” a book on how a fictional company becomes profitable after a crisis-driven change in its information technology management style. I love reading books, especially about the computer industry, along with fiction and nonfiction, but this one was hard to finish. It had been recommended by many people I know in Silicon Valley in the IT field as being an authentic account of their daily jobs. The reason this book was so hard to finish for me is that I kept thinking, Why do you people still continue to work at such horrible places? The protagonist of the book is promoted to a managerial position and his life starts to fall apart. The long hours he works not only burns him out, but he also spends less time at home, putting pressure on his wife (who also works) and children. I understand the point of the book is to promote the processes of IT automation, so that a real company does not fall into the trap of the fictional company in the book. Too many times you hear about these companies in real life and, every time one problem is solved at them, the management seems to fall into another company-threatening problem.
There was a story in the early ’90s when Microsoft was working on Windows NT (for you young people, that operating system is the basis of every Windows version presently produced), when the brilliant Dave Cutler and a bunch of D.E.C. computer engineers came over to Microsoft to plan and implement this ground-breaking OS. The group checked in code on Christmas Day. At the time this was unthinkable, working on that holiday; however, present day, stories like that are rampant.
In Silicon Valley, you have both members of a couple working long hours, dropping their kids off at daycare in the morning and picking them up in the evening. On the weekend, they spend time getting their scheduling projects and readying them for work in the coming week. Occasionally, they might break away to be a family, and have a few hours of family time.
My message is this to the Silicon Valley people trying to get rich. It’s not worth it. Work hard at what you love without sacrificing those that you love and who love you. You can have a comfortable life and not be consumed by work. You can relocate someplace where the small starter houses don’t start at $1.2 million and come with a two-hour commute each way to work. I know you think the rest of the country (and world) looks on at you with envy, but it’s actually the opposite: We can’t imagine throwing away everything and wasting decades at jobs that are no better than a remote chance to win the lottery.
By the way, here in Southern California our Thanksgiving dinner cost about $60. And I spent all day and night with my family.