Sleepless in SiVal

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Sleepless in SiVal


It's a sign of our times.  Since I've started this development job,
I've been working more hours than I used to.  Though, I still manage
to get 6-7 hours sleep.  I don't know if I could handle the sort of
sleep habits described in the following San Jose Mercury news article
which was forwarded from someone in my development team...
Sleepless in Silicon Valley
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Technology's fast track dictates a slumberless lifestyle

Published: June 21, 1996

BY MARK LEIBOVICH
Mercury News Staff Wrier

On a typical night, Andre Lamothe will stare into the glow of his
MultiSync XP computer monitor until 5 a.m. He will doze off at 6 and
sleep until the phone rings from the East Coast or Europe around 8.

If it's a restful night, maybe he'll knock off at 4 a.m. and steal
three hours; or if he's feeling fitful, he'll thrash around in bed and
maybe not sleep at all. Lamothe, 28, who runs a video game start-up
company from his Milpitas home, says he feels his body aching more
than it did when he was younger. Some mornings he feels dizzy.

Yet he endures a schedule dictated in part by a high-tech industry
spinning so fast it renders sleep a luxury.  Sleep is unproductive
time, an annoying rest stop off technology's fast-track to the
future. To resist has become a necessary, if not desirable, lifestyle
choice for a growing after-hours club of mortals like Lamothe. They
have taken the '80s-vintage workaholism that built today's Silicon
Valley and accelerated it to extreme -- some would say pathological --
levels.

''We are all absolutely out of control, on a race for something we're
not even sure exists,'' says Lamothe, an avid weightlifter who roller
blades through the dark streets of Milpitas when he needs a
break. ''This will be the first generation to show the physical and
mental toll of the information age. We're pushing against how we've
evolved on the planet.''

It's a motto that drives this bleary-eyed segment of valley life:
Snooze too long and someone else grabs the patent, promotion, venture
capital or market share.  Never mind the colds, occasional delirium and
hazards of driving home drowsy.  This is the price of participation in
a global marketplace oblivious to time zones, with start-ups sprouting
daily and a mad dash to cultivate new Internet technologies. E-mail,
ISDN lines and the Web have colonized homes as workplace extensions;
product cycles have been compressed in the pursuit of beating the next
guy's brainchild out the door.

''There's been an incredible escalation in the speed with which
products are being developed,'' says Lenny Siegel, director of the
Pacific Studies Center, a non-profit advocate group in Mountain
View. ''  Ten years ago it was enough just to rush from one job to the
next,'' he says. ''Now you need to start something before you finish
something else.''

Beyond competitive realities, the sleepless ethic springs from a
uniquely compulsive computer mentality in an industry that glories in
pushing limits and subverting conventions. Great programs and
companies have been born under the glare of fluorescence, buoyed by
adrenaline and caffeine.

''I've never understood the need to sleep,'' says David Filo, the
30-year-old co-founder of Yahoo! Inc., who fights the urge just as
hard now as he did before his company went public in April and he
became a multimillionaire on paper.  Filo seldom sleeps more than four
hours a night, sometimes under his desk: ''I'm always looking for a
way to avoid sleep.  Physically, I don't think you need it. It's more
a mental thing.''

Night work is well suited to a techie's mindset that prizes long,
uninterrupted clumps of time free from daytime interruptions such as
phone calls. ''You don't find a lot of people who get into this
business because they are political creatures who love to schmooze and
sit in meetings,'' says Michael Latham, a0- year-old group director
at SegaSoft, his Redwood City office still a blur of activity at 2
a.m. Latham rarely sleeps more than four hours. He calls this ''a
permanent lifestyle choice'' -- or as permanent as his body allows.

''They can hang a gold watch from my corpse,'' he says.

Like a college dorm

Combine this nocturnal affinity with furious competition and you get
this hyper-driven slice of Silicon Valley.  Company campuses might
evoke the frivolous air of a college dorm late at night, with
T-shirted post-adolescents eating pizza and playing foosball in their
bare feet, but that does not disguise the warrior's mentality that
characterizes so many work ethics.  Rare is the person who complains
about fatigue. ''You have to afford the intellect the chance to
transcend limits,'' says Byron Rakitzis, 27, a programmer at Network
Appliance, a Mountain View file server company. ''That is the price we
pay for supreme human accomplishment.''

Last year that price became too high for Rakitzis when he plunged to
''an emotional crisis point,'' which he blames partly on a work
schedule that typically landed him in bed at 4 a.m. Even when he slept
enough, Rakitzis felt bone-tired.  Computer commands would invade his
thoughts unbidden as he drove to work. He took three months off
starting in December.

Rakitzis returned to Network in March and now calls himself ''a
recovering night person.'' He tries to leave his office by 5.  But
when the interview ends, Rakitzis is still at his terminal, ensconced
in a bug report at 1 a.m. He plans to scale back to part-time work
later this year.

If anyone ever discusses being tired, it's often in a boastful
way. ''We compare how little we sleep in the same way athletes compare
knee injuries,'' Rakitzis says. Like sports, high tech is
predominantly a young man's arena, subject to the limits of the aging
process. Single males under5 are the prevailing demographic in the
industry. You sense some racing to coax as much production as possible
from their bodies (and money from their companies) before they get too
old.

''The goal used to be to become a millionaire by 40,'' says Gary
Burke, president of the Santa Clara Valley Manufacturing Group, a
high-tech trade association. ''Now it seems like it's down into the
20s.''

This ambition extends to the broader technological sensibility of
today's Silicon Valley. ''It is no longer enough to solve a problem in
this valley,'' says Chuck Darrah, chairman of the anthropology
department at San Jose State University. ''Now we expect everything we
do to be a model for the rest of the world. If you're off the highway
for a nanosecond, time passes you by.''

In this context, sleep becomes a ready casualty. ''You sense this new,
panicky edge to staying ahead of the competition and the technology
curve,'' says Lili Pratt King, a career counselor who works with
Stanford Business School graduates. Forget the notion of the relaxed
California lifestyle. ''People in Silicon Valley have developed this
tenacious inability to let go of their workday and rest. It has become
so profound and much worse than anything I have seen on the East Coast
or in the Midwest.''

This is hardly a unanimous way of life among the valley's high-tech
workforce, estimated at 200,000. People who adhere to traditional
schedules account for two commuting periods each day. But high-tech
campus parking lots can be crowded at a.m. And many evening
commuters will log on to their office networks from home.

Sending e-mail at 2 a.m.

Brian Ehrmantraut, the3-year-old systems engineering director at
Network Appliance, leaves his office most nights at 8 and works at
home in Saratoga until 2 a.m. Ehrmantraut tries to sleep five
hours. But if he gets an idea when his head hits the pillow, he'll get
out of bed and send it to a colleague on e-mail. ''I will e-mail
someone at 2, wake up with another idea at 4 and find that my 2
o'clock e-mail has been answered already,'' he says.

If he can't get home, Ehrmantraut's office is equipped for long-term
comfort: stereo, bowl of fruit and espresso machine, with a stuffed
Tasmanian devil atop his terminal (''to scare away the marketing
guys''). If a deadline looms, SegaSoft workers sleep at a nearby Motel
6 at company expense; Netscape Communications Corp. employees used to
sleep in designated futon rooms, but the company removed them, partly
to encourage workers to stop working and go home.

But habits die hard.

''People keep asking for the futon room to come back,'' says Cindy
Hall, a Netscape technical writer and a late-night regular at the
Internet giant's Mountain View campus. With gym bags packed with
clothes, personal hygiene items and roller-blading equipment, Hall
calls herself ''a yuppie bag-lady.''

''Instead of pushing my shopping cart, I just cram everything into the
back of my Beemer.''

Employees are often grouped in a ''team'' structure, and when
deadlines and shipping dates near, late night becomes essential work
time. In a collaborative environment, failure to pull your weight can
be devastating. ''We work under aggressive deadlines, and no one wants
to have to say "this is my fault,''' says Hall. Peer pressure
intensifies when, as in the case of many companies, employees own
stock.

Computer product teams are socialized like soldiers in a platoon, says
Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park.  ''In war,
no one dies for their country,'' he says. ''They die because a
structure is set up where you look like a coward in front of a big
group of people. Same thing if you're in a group developing a
product.'' Saffo describes today's Silicon Valley as ''an intellectual
arms race.''

The machines themselves cast their own tyranny. Engineers and
programmers describe the time-warp sensation of tinkering with a
problem for a few seconds, only to realize hours have passed. ''Last
night, I was working on a piece of code, and I just couldn't get
everything working at once,'' says Deborah Kurata, co-owner of InStep
Technology, a software consulting company in Pleasanton. ''But I kept
getting positive feedback from the computer. It's so addictive. I had
to keep going until I was finished.''

By which time it was 4 a.m. At 7:30, after a nap, Kurata was up
getting her two daughters ready for school.

A family sleep trade-off

Among high-tech parents, Kurata's is a familiar scheduling equation:
Borrow from sleep time to balance the demands of family with
career. Before his son,-year-old Andrew, was born, Greg Gilley,
the director of engineering for imaging and video products at Adobe
Systems, would leave his office at 10 or 11 p.m. Now he gets home
at 6, eats dinner, gives Andrew a bath, puts him to bed and spends
time with his wife, Karen. At 10, Gilley returns to Adobe in Mountain
View, and he doesn't get home again until around or 4 a.m.

''You either have to trade off family or sleep,'' Gilley says, eating
a Butterfinger in his office at midnight.  ''There's no real choice.''

Pale and disheveled, Gilley does not look well. He doesn't exercise
and hasn't seen a doctor in five years, and Karen worries about
him. When his current product cycle ends, he plans to catch up on
rest. ''I can usually go at this pace for four months before I'm
toast,'' he says. How long has he been at it now? Gilley shakes his
head: ''Eight months.''

Later this month, Helmut Kobler, the 27-year-old president of Cyclone
Studios, a subsidiary ofDO, a games company, will take his first
vacation in years. ''There's almost a folkloric quality to pulling
all-nighters in this business,'' Kobler says, sitting in aDO cubicle
at midnight. ''But once you go through it for a few years, they lose
their romance. Now I'd rather be in bed.''  Kobler acknowledges he has
said this before:

''I've said to myself, "I'm sick of eating Campbell's soup every
night. I have to develop other interests. I vow to change. But after a
while, my life starts feeling pedestrian. And I want to conquer the
world again.''


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