Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  The late Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, whose black-turtlenecked ghost looms powerfully over every budding Valley entrepreneur, set the tone at the first Stanford Conference on Entrepreneurship in the early 1980s. “There is something going on here on a scale which has never been seen on the face of the earth,” he said, with characteristic portentousness, describing what he called the area’s “critical mass of entrepreneurial risk culture.” “A lot of people ask if Silicon Valley is ever going to be unionized,” Jobs went on. “I say everybody’s unionized … There’s much greater union here than I’ve seen anywhere. What we’re starting to see is the redefinition of the corporation in America.”9 It was a sign of the times that Jobs could pretend not to know the meaning of the word “union.” Yet he was right in describing the workplaces of the Valley as being knotted together by powerfully, almost desperately strong forms of corporate culture. The hierarchies were flatter, the amenities were better, and the stock options were plentiful, making for offices that often evinced, at least on the surface, high degrees of teamwork. It helped, paradoxically, that at any minute one team member might pick up and leave, to start a new, competing team somewhere else.

  Appropriate to its churning, libertarian ethos, Silicon Valley was born in an office revolt. In the lore they are known as the Traitorous Eight—the young engineers who in 1967 walked out of Shockley Semiconductor Labs to found their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, the first company to manufacture chips exclusively in silicon. In 1968, two of those eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, resigned; they each put up $250,000 to found Intel Corporation,10 one of the first companies with a nonhierarchical, open-plan office, replete with secondhand metal desks.11 Three years later, they had produced the world’s first microprocessor. The rest of the iconic Valley companies have similar stories, which have spread far beyond its traffic-choked two-freeway peninsula into postindustrial folklore: Dave Packard and William Hewlett working out of their garage (now a landmark); Jobs and his co-conspirator Steve Wozniak, who had left Atari and Hewlett-Packard, respectively, presenting the Apple 1 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto; and of course the thousands of students for whom late-night hacking binges in dorms and rec rooms on college campuses like Stanford formed their early idea of what a “workplace” should be like. This pervasive culture, or cult, of informality, coupled with an intense devotion to all-hours work, would have an enormous influence on the work environments of the Valley.

  Another key factor in the rise of the Valley was the counterculture. The first generation of Valley pioneers was unimpressed with the goings-on at nearby Berkeley and San Francisco State. “We are really the revolutionaries in the world today—not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago,” Gordon Moore told Fortune in 1973. People like Packard, one of the prosecutors of the Vietnam War, were often objects of student protest. Valley computer geeks often had little compunction about supporting the American war machine. But the second generation—Jobs and Wozniak’s generation—was different. They enjoyed a well-chronicled relationship to recreational drug use and, less often, political activity. Pirates of Silicon Valley, a 1990s film chronicling the dual rise of Jobs and Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates, makes this point explicitly, having Jobs and Wozniak weaving in and out of a pot-smoke-ringed antiwar protest, carrying computer parts back to their home. Jobs and Gates were famously dropouts, and so were countless others—a common feature of the Valley career that would be exacerbated in the 1990s by the promise of gargantuan venture capital payouts based on slivers of wisps of ideas. The disaffection with figures of authority meant that most Silicon Valley types couldn’t tolerate university learning for long, even though, ironically, they would go out of their way to make their offices resemble college campuses.

  At first the signature Valley office was filled with cubicles. That sounds of course like yet another callous business environment. In the Valley, however, cubicles were adopted as a deliberate affront to the traditional office arrangements still on offer in the rest of the corporate world. Like the Bürolandschaft that made it possible, the all-cubicle office was a symbolic gesture toward equality. Whatever its aesthetic value, forcing all employees, whether bosses or staff, to wade into a sea of flimsy partitions was more egalitarian than having most out in the snake pit with others snug in closed-door offices, let alone executive suites. And though the office layouts themselves were uninspiring, the surrounding amenities were enormously better than at most places. Besides the fabled Foosball tables and basketball hoops that soon became the boilerplate references in the media, many, if not most, Silicon Valley companies offered rec centers and swimming pools; they usually didn’t insist on suits and ties; work hours followed flextime, while job rotations and autonomous work teams were normal; and to foster corporate bonding, they hosted picnics, barbecues, and end-of-the-week “beer busts,” where workers got together, drank beers—and inevitably did more work. It was the college lifestyle extended into the early days of a startup and then institutionalized as the startup got bigger. Not uncommon in Silicon Valley, this fun office lifestyle became the subject of legend. In 1984, the New York Times reporter Robert Reinhold wrote that workers at the Rolm Corporation, a Silicon Valley telecom company, “eat subsidized meals in the restaurant-like cafeteria, choose their own hours, and enjoy a company recreation center that offers two pools, volleyball, racquetball and courses ranging from skiing to pregnancy care.” In those anxious, global-competition-fearing times, he compared it to Japanese techniques of worker involvement. “The methods vary widely,” Reinhold wrote, “but [all the Valley companies] have one thing in common: a belief that the traditional hierarchical structure of older Eastern-based companies has hobbled American industry in an age when technological change is so rapid that a few weeks lost can mean the difference between failure and success.”12

  But for the workers, over time these companies ceased to be the vanguard organizations of a future utopia and became instead just like big businesses of old. Embodied above all in lumbering behemoths like IBM (and later replaced by the idea-stealing giant Microsoft and its nasal-voiced overlord, Bill Gates), they were the companies to beat—the ones stifling, rather than fostering, innovation. And workers felt it immediately in the design of the offices. In a typical Silicon Valley reminiscence from the 1980s, one worker held the workplace utopia up to critical scrutiny:

  Management took great pride in being an exponent of the “Office of the Future” concept, which was touted as effecting a radical transformation of conventional office relations and designs. Since it is said that change begins at home, I looked around the office. It consisted of a series of cubicles with tall dividers; in order to speak to anybody, I had to stand up and peer over the partition. Each cubicle was unbelievably cramped; there were no windows; the ceilings were claustrophobically low; and fans spread the stale air around equitably and democratically. The supervisor’s fan was at floor level, a detail I discovered after almost shredding my pants leg in the blades. Most workers didn’t even have a phone at their desks—no doubt, such a “privilege” would have been “abused” to the detriment of the productivity level …

  The message? Office of the Future = More of the Same.13

  When the largest tech corporations expanded in the mid-1990s, each needed to consider the benefits of closed offices versus an open-plan office with cubicles. Microsoft added more closed offices. So did Apple, which by the late 1980s was dealing with chronic absenteeism from its employees; its workers had found the noisy cubicle environment so detrimental to concentration that they often stayed home. Its redesign adopted the “cave and commons” approach pioneered by Marvin Minsky at MIT, where a common meeting space determined the shape of windowed offices in the periphery.14 Most tech companies, however, despite employee complaints, followed the lead of Intel. Intel did not pretend that the cubicle was a great place to be; instead, it pretended that it could foster an egalitarian work environment by
insisting that even the staff of upper management work in cubicles, that there should be no “mahogany row” at Intel. Intel used only two sizes and styles of office furniture; as in a kind of state socialism for design, everyone would be starved of beauty equally.15 Introducing Grove at the Los Angeles Times Annual Investment Strategies conference, reporter James Flanagan described visiting Intel’s workplace in 1996: “Here were cubicle dividers, and behind the cubicle dividers was a desk, a computer, and a man, Andrew Grove. And you looked at that and you thought, well, wait a minute: What kind of business is this?”16 Another employee, introducing Grove at an Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, said, “Andy has nurtured an egalitarian culture at Intel … We all work in a company where Andy Grove’s cubicle—which I think is about eight by nine—is just like everybody else’s.”17

  Yet Grove’s was a gesture of pure irony. The cubicle had come to represent the exploitation and unhappiness of white-collar workers, but the idea that those modular walls, those tackboards, actually determined anything was patently false. You could hardly be said to occupy a cubicle if you could leave whenever you pleased, probably spent most of your working hours flying around the country in the company jet, and earned $100 million a year. This was not, incidentally, a nuance lost on Grove’s employees: his “egalitarian culture” led to the employee-constructed Web site FACE Intel (Former and Current Employees of Intel), an enormous blog-like register of complaints about overwork and employee abuse. A quotation from Elie Wiesel headlined the home page (“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest”), and the Web site’s creators were well aware that Grove himself, a Hungarian Jew, had spent the war hiding out in a cellar.

  It was this experience, repeated at tech companies everywhere, that prompted much of the hatred of traditional offices that was specific to the Valley in the 1990s. Dilbert had made the cubicle the perfect symbol of business callousness in general, revealing how its antihierarchical symbolism only concealed real hierarchies. But many of the Microsoft engineers, all of whom enjoyed private offices, didn’t necessarily feel that having four walls was conducive to good thinking and innovation. Partitioned or not, the design at the big Valley companies was felt to be unexciting; it didn’t seem to correspond to the brave new workplace that was perpetually being promised and was forever out of reach. Something more informal, and yet more thoroughly human, was necessary. In Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, a group of programmers at Microsoft (former art-school students like the author) find themselves disgusted with their evil company and their endless work lives: “the first generation of Microsoft employees faced with reduced stock options and, for that matter, plateauing stock prices.” “I guess,” the narrator concludes, “that makes them mere employees, just like at any other company.”18 They accordingly leave to found their own company in Silicon Valley. Where their previous Redmond, Washington, company was a corridor-private-office setup (and modeled after the real Microsoft), their new Palo Alto, California, office resembles something more “dorm-like.” And they suddenly find themselves enjoying their work, sliding effortlessly in and out of it, as if it were merely one with their biological cycles. The endless search for venture capital is finally denounced as beside the point by one of the programmers, for whom the work was everything. “I would have come here for nothing. I never had to get paid,” he insists. “It’s not the money. It’s never been the money. It rarely ever is.”19

  Anxiety over the dreams of what many were increasingly calling a “New Economy” and its reality built up an impressive amount of repressed energy in the Valley offices. The result, as journalist-scholars of the changing workplace like Andrew Ross have noted, was a kind of religious atmosphere, more akin to a Pentecostal revival meeting than the corporate world, where proclamations of the coming insurrection of knowledge workers were issued in thunder. Manifestos began to appear, especially in new institutions like Wired magazine, that heralded the coming techno-utopian future. Tom Peters, on the success of yet more dubious books, quit his role at McKinsey and restyled himself as a wild-man business guru, a Timothy Leary of the management world, hailing the new loving and feeling and hearing that was on the verge of coming into rapturous being. If only we would taste what he was tasting, we would know! His titles became increasingly unhinged: from Thriving on Chaos, a paean to the junk-bond 1980s that he had helped foster, he arrived at last with Liberation Management, a nearly nine-hundred-page tome on the glorious disorder of the “nanosecond nineties.” “If you don’t feel crazy,” he cried, “you’re not in touch with the times! The point is vital. These are nutty times. Nutty organizations, nutty people, capable of dealing with the fast, fleeting, fickle, are a requisite for survival.”20 It was a new region, Peters said, that had given him religion. “When I worked on In Search of Excellence, from 1978 to 1982, my eyes still mostly turned eastward (Detroit, etc.), toward yesterday’s big manufacturers,” he confessed. But Silicon Valley had changed everything, he argued, in increasingly “radical” prose. “I’ve had all of my assumptions about ‘organization’ ripped asunder as I’ve watched the Valley thrive,” he cried. “It has elbowed its way into the planet’s consciousness, largely courtesy of failure after failure after failure (and, along the way, many more than its fair share of successes—mostly by-products of the most exciting failures). It’s instructive to think about how Silicon Valley pulled off its coup: It provides many people with a heavy dose of liberation, and, God knows, it’s disorganized. By living in its midst, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that it’s time to shed—make that shred—the old images.”21 He went on to praise “non-territorial” offices as part of the liberation—the kind that IBM had tried in the 1970s but that more and more Valley companies were just beginning to experiment with. In the informal office, Peters suggested, lay salvation.

  Finally, the heavens opened up, just as Peters had predicted. In the year of Bill Clinton’s reelection, economic growth rates unexpectedly surged, and investors were ecstatic. For years, the fabled promises of the computer age had appeared “everywhere except in the productivity statistics,” as the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow famously put it. But in the years after 1995, the output-per-hour rate rose 2.8 percent—the delayed result, economists claimed, of investment in IT infrastructure. Soon, venture capital began washing through the industry in great, titanic waves; at its peak in 1999, $20 million a day was being thrown at companies in and around San Francisco. The money was pouring into Silicon Valley with such Niagara-like force that no one was able to retain the kind of earnestness purveyed in Microserfs. Nor, too, did the counterculture put up any resistance. Hackers who had hailed the utopian promise of the Internet now spoke of the utopian promise of their companies. Indeed, the counterculture became the willing accomplice of the New Economy—the marker that made it hip and attracted a whole host of slackers, hitherto unwilling to join, into the willing arms of the dot-com companies. They would make their workplaces into palaces of informality to house the knowledge workers whose time, at last, had come.

  Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990s. New Economy offices tended to have a cultivated negligence to them: picnic-table desks spread out at odd angles, piles of paper and crisscrossing wires everywhere, scruffy workers crouched in front of their screens in their pajamas, sporting carefully sculpted bed-head haircuts, while classic rock—the new era’s Muzak—blared overhead. Compared with earlier generations of offices, this one arguably looked worse: more chaotic, less manageable. And the truth was that everything was moving too fast for anyone to design in the thorough way once imagined by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with those tilted Mies van der Rohe chairs and wood-paneled partitions siphoning off luxurious offices.

  This was not because the programmers didn’t care about design. On the contrary: the dot-
commers, the moment they got a little money in their pockets (and in the 1990s, as many will remember, it didn’t take long), tried to scale up their offices as quickly and as painlessly as possible. They needed to plan for an office that could accommodate fifteen people one week and sixty the next. Teams would have to assemble for a quick deadline and then drop everything on a dime to move on to a new project. What they needed was an office that was much like the one Robert Propst imagined thirty years before: an office design that could be changed at a moment’s notice; a design that didn’t look like design; a design that was “forgiving.”

  But it had to be forgiving not just to work but also to something more vague and intangible, though inescapable in those years: company culture. The concept was a descendant of the old human relations school of thinking about work. The employees of Razorfish (covered in detail in Andrew Ross’s book No-Collar) embodied this sort of concern. Razorfish was one of the iconic dot-com Web design firms, having grown from a startup in an East Village apartment in 1995 to, in 2000, a multinational consulting firm, with offices in Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Milan, Stockholm, Oslo, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. Proud of their workplace atmosphere, employees there told Andrew Ross that “culture” had to be fostered through permissiveness. One worker called it “the permission to give permission, to yourself and to others” (a formulation she confessed was “hopelessly abstract”). Another more plainly said, “There was the official party line on culture, which was enforced fun, and then there was what we created for ourselves.”22 No one could point out examples of this culture, but they knew what it was not: buying a video game system for the office or having Nerf wars. Nor was it one of the amenity-rich big corporations that the Valley was full of, many of which were Razorfish’s clients. They had been there and seen those, with the usual cube farms, empty work relationships, and, worst of all, enforced fun. Office design was important. But rather than legislate a culture, it had to allow one to come into being.