Last Tuesday, along with thousands of others, I spent much of my day waiting for the power to come back on after the massive blackout that crippled the greater San Francisco area.
There were no phone calls to answer, no software problems to contend with...not what I would call a "disaster." As I sat in my office, surrounded by a lifeless network of darkened computer screens, I took a certain amount of guilty pleasure in the few hours break from my daily routine the outage afforded me.
Considering that it took a power failure of historic magnitude to give me even that brief lull, however, I couldn't help but wonder about the role of technology in our working lives.
There's no doubt that it has transformed the American workplace in the 20th century. But although the technology industry is often painted with glowing colors by the media, the reality of the computer revolution is that, for employees of hi-tech companies, it too often echoes the less-opulent working conditions of the Industrial Revolution before it.
From Silicon Valley on up to San Francisco's "Multimedia Gulch," you can poke your head into any average office after 6pm and you're likely to find a few people diligently laboring to finish their tasks in their off hours, in hopes of meeting some impossible break-of-dawn deadline.
In many workplaces, it's a kind of unstated policy that the official company working hours are only a rough guideline, and employees will stay as late as necessary to get the job done before the start of the next day. MIS personnel, in particular, are often considered "on call" 24 hours a day, so that they may be notified in the event of a systems crash — and in many cases they bear this burden willingly. What's baffling is, why?
It's true that salaries in hi-tech fields can be substantial. But while long hours are commonplace, employees in computer fields typically are not paid overtime, and "comp time" is rarely offered. It's not uncommon for hi-tech workers to be hired as self-employed contractors, though often with dubious legal justification.
These freelancers are extended no paid vacation or sick time — let alone a pension, health care, or any other employment benefits. They assume full tax liability for any wages they receive. Further, they can be terminated at a moment's notice, should their project be cut or the company be restructured.
Because of the libertarian mindset common amongst computer professionals, unions in this industry are virtually unheard of, and many workers would be unwilling to unionize even if the opportunity were presented them.
Freedom from conventional labor politics can be refreshing. But at the same time, as the hi-tech workforce ages, and starts looking to buy homes and raise families, many will be faced with real problems. Babies need health coverage. And contractors, even those with one or two full-time clients, typically have trouble getting home loans.
It isn't really surprising that, rather than deal with these issues, industry often looks for an easier way out. One solution is to mine an ever-younger workforce. At Sequoia High School in Redwood City, for instance, Cisco Systems is sponsoring computer network training. This, school administrators claimed, would give students a shot at a $40,000-a-year hi-tech job, right out of high school. Opponents of the program say it's nothing more than a recruitment vehicle for Cisco.
Young recruits are useful to the hi-tech industry, for more reasons than just a "fresh outlook." By hiring entry-level employees directly from college, companies like Microsoft have an easier time indoctrinating them into the local corporate culture.
Eager twenty-somethings are much less likely to complain about laboring late into the night in a campus-style live/work environment, hounded by unattainable product deadlines. Even less so, eighteen-year-olds, once you put their first $40K in their hands. And while these young workers have a high "burnout" rate, there's always a fresh crop to replace those who can't hack it (no pun intended).
Nonetheless, the public's enthusiasm for the hi-tech industry continues unabated, fueled by a potent mixture of optimism and greed. Investor speculation inflates the stocks of Internet startups to astronomical proportions, shortly after their initial public offerings. Seeing this massive influx of funds, intelligent young people continue to flock to the industry in droves, each secretly hoping to capture some of the success of a Bill Gates, or a Steve Jobs.
But for every success story of two guys laboring nights and weekends in their garage to produce an Apple 1 computer, or signing a fortune-making deal with IBM for the MS-DOS operating system, there are a dozen other tales with not-so-happy endings.
Few of the most heavily traded Internet companies have yet to see a profit, despite their hype. And while, to the founders of hi-tech companies, failure often means little more than the loss of some venture capital, to their employees it can mean years of late nights and weekends at the office, with little compensation to show for it.
In the end, the irony of all this technical innovation is that while the PC was meant to enhance and improve our lives, instead we all too often find ourselves in service to the systems we create. We're living on machine time.
You'll stay late to get that report to London, first thing in the morning, because the email system makes it possible. When your MIS manager gets a page in the middle of the night, more than likely it will be a computer on the other end, automatically notifying him of the systems failure. Time is of the essence; every second of down-time means lost profits. Computers never sleep.
While we in the hi-tech industry tend to fancy ourselves the architects of the machine-works that run the world, in truth we sometimes seem to be nothing more than gears in a machine that is larger than any of us. And it takes an event like last week's power failure in San Francisco before we take notice of that machine, if only by its ominous silence.
Caught up in the excitement of progress and bedazzled by the allure of the future, we neglect to observe the lessons of the past. In the last century, laborers on the railways and in factories laid the foundations of the modern business economy. Yet often it was at great human cost. I sometimes wonder — are we so different?
