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Searching for silicon soul
"The Nudist on the Late Shift" and "The Silicon Boys" sift the valley's culture for something more than wealth and greed.
By Andrew Leonard
[06/25/99]

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[06/24/99]

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Who owns the New York Times bestseller list?
On the Net, fighting to hang on to every last chunk of intellectual property is a recipe for stagnation and failure.
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[06/23/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 29: Marketing mutiny and the magic love burrito
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[06/23/99]

Antiques Netshow
Snooty Sotheby's dives into an online auction world shaped by scrappy eBay. How will its objets d'art fare amid the Furbys?
By Janelle Brown
[06/22/99]

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By Po Bronson

June 25, 1999 | Steve Sellers and John Hanke were pinching themselves as they drove from Berkeley to San Mateo on that October evening. "It was like we turned the light switch on," Steve said.

Sellers' and Hanke's The Big Network was a year-old game site where Internet users can play simple board games like chess and card games like poker against other users. No sooner had they started putting feelers out about their transition to Java than, suddenly, it was happening. Suddenly, every big Web site had decided they wanted to offer their users simple board games. Yahoo had bought one company, Classic Games, and Excite had arranged a licensing deal with another game provider, TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. Infoseek and Netscape's Netcenter followed Excite's suit. Steve Sellers got a hold of a producer at Snap, the fastest growing search directory on the Web, who stepped up and offered The Big Network a contract.

There was only one problem ...

Snap's representative, Dan Burkhart, had come to The Big Network's tiny little underground virtual office in Berkeley, and Dan had to ask -- where were the programmers?

Steve and John hemmed and hawed, not wanting to quite admit they were a virtual company, and then Dan Burkhart asked, "Well, are they employees, or are they just freelancers?" Snap wasn't going to do business with a rag-tag company that couldn't handle the volume of its millions of users. John Hanke had drawn up a schedule, and on his calendar he wrote the necessary milestones in a red pen. Then he had scrawled a big green "X" on November 16th, launch day. Now that he had committed to this date, the Big Green X loomed heavily.

Also Today Searching for silicon soul "The Nudist on the Late Shift" and "The Silicon Boys" sift the valley's culture for something more than wealth and greed.

"Well, they're under contract," John Hanke said. Freelancers, but with some guarantees on availability.

So Dan asked the next logical question. "Do they have a stake in the outcome? Do they hold options?" Then he stated the point more directly. "How do we know they're going to still be here next month?"

"Oh, that's no problem," John Hanke assured him.

"We've got a great relationship with these guys," added Steve Sellers. "We've known them for a couple years." This wasn't quite true.

John and Steve managed to get through the meeting without blinking, but as soon as it was over they got in the car and were driving from Berkeley to Belmont, just south of San Mateo.

The Big Network did have five low-cost freelance programmers who had brought the company this far. In addition, Steve Sellers' younger brother Mike, who was the company's creative director, could help out in a pinch. The company's chief technology officer, Arie Grossman, could handle site integration. John Hanke's plan -- ever intent on saving money -- was to fall back on that low-cost B-team with the code that wasn't mission critical. For the code that was, they would go out and hire the best programmer they had ever known, Kevin Hester.

Sellers had known Kevin since they had both worked at 3DO together. Steve never would have considered getting into the Snap deal if not for Kevin being between projects right now and available. A housemate of Kevin's, Mark "Max" Maxham, had just recently started doing some piecemeal work for The Big Network. He was proving to be just as studly as Kevin.

If by chance you've read "The Soul of a New Machine," or any of its descendant reportings on deadline development, you know how this "signing up" session is supposed to go. The manager says to the programmer, "It will be hard work, thankless hours for not a lot of pay. But it's the cutting edge -- you'll have to figure out how to surpass the technology of our competitors. It's a job for only the best." And the programmer can't resist a duel, wants to prove he's one of the best, so he signs on. For pride. For the intellectual challenge.

That was the old way of working with programmers.

But, uh ... the world's a little different now.

Next page | Life in the Geekhaus: What does a studly-engineer magnet do for fun?