The elevator door slides
open and Jess slides in, looking slightly rumpled. Tara sizes her
up.
"Didn't get much sleep last night?"
"You can tell?"
"Well, you're wearing the same clothes as yesterday."
Jess laughs. Her music show, Freq, broadcast live over the
Internet here at new-media house Pseudo, went late last night.
Apparently the crowd got deep into the mix and the staff wound up
hanging around until dawn. Now it's 10:30, and she's back from
breakfast to make calls and set up meetings. "At some point I'm
gonna have to shower," she mutters as she wanders off to her desk.
Tara and I tour Pseudo studios, an odd mix of high camp and high
tech. Each room reflects the peculiar pop-cultural animus of the
twentysomethings who work here. There's the room for the women's Net
shows, decorated in a late-'70s drag with a rainbow-colored bead
door, shag carpeting, and inflatable toys. A group of goateed
musicians hangs out in another room, holding keyboards and a
computer monitor. (Who are they? "I have no idea," Tara says.)
There's a massive ballroom on the top floor where Freq is shot,
complete with Dorian pillars and an ornate high ceiling, a reminder
that this part of Soho has some of New York's most architecturally
quirky lofts.
A recent graduate of Ohio University's broadcast news program,
Tara is, technically speaking, executive assistant to Pseudo's CEO.
Yesterday, however, the company needed someone to dress up as a
"Pseudo chick" for a promotional photo shoot, so Tara--a tall, blond
22-year-old--found herself strapped into tall, white go-go boots, a
micro mini, and a faux-fur-fringed black top. "The photographer had
this 40-ouncer of Wild Turkey, and he kept saying, 'Want some more?
Want some more?' " she recalls. "We wound up getting loaded." She
didn't manage more than a few hours of sleep. "Sorry," she
apologizes, yawning. "I'm a bit burnt out today."
In new media, it's difficult to find anyone who can boast a full
night's rest. Later, I visit a 23-year-old acquaintance at a Web
site design firm across town, only to find him collapsed on a comfy
sofa in the staff room.
Late night? "Yeah." He's been setting up a database for a Web
site set to go live in two days. The client--a major corporation--is
getting twitchy. Some deeply caffeinated all-nighters will be called
for. "It's intense, but it's going pretty well," he says, his hair
out of whack with a minor case of bed-head. "I figure I have another
two days like this. But it's cool--it's a really cool project." He
pours himself a thick coffee (bypassing the free beer) in the
well-stocked kitchen and heads back to his workstation, plopping
down beside two dozen other coders and designers clacking away at
their keyboards as a stereo pumps out ambient techno on an endless
loop. Most of them figure they'll be here until four in the morning.
Pulling all-nighters, destroying your eyesight, playing Quake on
the company LAN, hanging out in a funky office with your dog: For
Young Turks in the new-media workplace--software, Web site
development, the amorphous zone of "content"--this stuff is de
rigueur. On the surface, it has to do with making work seem more fun
and less like a job. Young digital workers, we're told, demand a
more creative and accommodating environment. They have thrown off
the stuffy, nine-to-five straitjacket in which their parents toiled.
No more suits and ties, rigid corporate hierarchies, or dull,
repetitive tasks. Today, work means getting to wear your Star Wars
T-shirt, display your multiple piercings, and hang out in an office
with homey perks: massage-therapist visits, pets, wacky furniture,
toys, lots of beer. The staff dines together and parties together;
they work hard, sure, but they also play hard, and usually at the
same time. And the workers aren't chained to one job anymore;
instead, they bop from company to company, forcing hapless employers
to scramble after them, offering ever funkier perks and more stock
options to lure their portable, highly paid talents. These kids hold
all the cards.
Reporters covering the industry marvel at the scenes of
controlled chaos and pop-cultural riot, offices transformed from
gray veal-fattening pens into bohemian venues with the ambience of
elite clubs. At New York's Razorfish, for example, the staff caps
off frantic all-nighters by hitting the powder for a weekend of
snowboarding. At Netscape in Mountain View, California, staff
members quit if they can't bring their dogs to work. And as USA
Today once breathlessly noted, Organic Online's office "has been the
scene of a dance party, complete with disc jockeys, for 400 people."
Which is precisely the problem.
This studied hipness is a fascinating and devious cultural
illusion. Ultracool offices cover up a seldom-discussed truth: The
jobs themselves are often deeply exploitative--demanding intense
work and devotion for relatively low pay and zero security. By
making work more like play, employers erase the division between the
two, which ensures that their young employees almost never leave the
office.
And it's true: High-tech employees hang out at work, killing
themselves over deadlines, putting in up to 100 hours a week.
Instead of going justifiably postal over crazy workloads (or
unionizing), they thank their lucky stars for being part of the
digital revolution, the cultural flashpoint of the '90s. For
employers, it's a sweet deal; you can't buy flexibility like that.
As more than one worker has told me, a Web site design company can
almost always hold a meeting at two on a Saturday afternoon because,
well, everyone's there. Where else would they be?
For all the talk of easygoing environments, new-media companies
are also notorious for employee burnout and nanosecond turnover.
It's not surprising: Given the insane hours, the payoffs are slim.
Despite media hype about high pay, desirability, and stock options,
none of these myths holds up under statistical scrutiny. The vast
majority of new-media workers in New York, for example, make less
than junior accountants or human-resource drones, enjoy the job
security of fast-food workers, and have a laughably small chance of
being offered stock. As for programmers, most are paid surprisingly
little and are hurled overboard as soon as they hit their mid-30s.
Enamored with its own distorted image, the digital workforce is
reluctant to accept the facts. "People do not want to face the
reality," complains Bill Lessard, an industry veteran who runs
NetSlaves, a Web site that compiles true tales of new-media burnout.
"Someone will tell you, 'Oh I'm a producer,' but they're just a
schmuck who's working 90 hours a week. You give these companies body
and soul and you really get nothing back."
In a weird way, the everyday lives of these workers undermine the
values under which they supposedly toil. Touted as the most
renegade--and entrepreneurial--generation in years, they are, in
traditional labor terms, amazingly subservient: the ideal
post-industrial employees. Chained to their keyboards, digital
employees paradoxically are the kind of compliant workforce that
would have pleased Henry Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, and even Chairman
Mao.
When I visit Fred Kahl at new-media firm Funny Garbage, he's busy
designing a shockwave-animated computer game based on the TV cartoon
Space Ghost. I peer over his shoulder at the screen, where Fred is
fiddling with a sequence: Space Ghost chasing the archvillain Lokar,
who is impersonating Santa Claus. In a few days, the game will air
on the Web site of the Cartoon Network, one of the company's major
clients. Kahl shows me around; it's not unlike wandering through a
'70s kitsch store, cluttered with retro pop-cultural icons. Fred's
desk sports several Silver Surfer models, toy UFOs, action figures,
and posters from the Coney Island Circus Sideshow (where he
previously worked as a sword swallower). One of the company's
founders, 33-year-old Peter Girardi, has three different video-game
systems in his office; when I checked in with him, he was "about
halfway" through Nintendo's Legend of Zelda.
Not everyone is horsing around; over by the animation computers,
three designers hunker down for a long haul, even though it's
already past 5:00 on a Friday night. By 9:00, staff members will
likely launch into a Quake tournament on the company LAN. It's easy
to see how work and life inexorably bleed into each other, and how
employers capitalize on the confusion. For people involved in
digital culture, a highly wired office can be more inviting than a
cramped Manhattan apartment, bar, or club.
In fact, work may offer better partying than a club. "It's always
been impossible at Pseudo to draw a line between what is a party and
what is a business," notes Jason Chervokas, co-founder of @NY, a Web
site that reports on New York's new-media scene. One of Pseudo's
longest-serving staff members is a 29-year-old programmer named
, who sports an ABUSE THE POWER T-shirt and takes a bemused
view of Pseudo's work mania. On his first day four years ago, he
arrived to find the office in a fantastic mess from a party held the
day before--with huge tubes that dripped water into wading pools,
dozens of performance artists, and a gargantuan octopus bong. That
morning, CEO Josh Harris staggered in from his on-site apartment,
wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and put Fortuna to work developing
the company's nascent chat-and-broadcast network--even though
Fortuna had never written a line of code in his life.
To get up to speed on HTML, Fortuna put in months of 12-hour
days. "I'd smoke incessantly while I worked, and I timed my breaks
for when the ashtray was brimming with butts," he laughs. "It was
just insane! . But I didn't mind. It was like a clubhouse." He
points to the loft's kooky mix of computers sitting on scarred,
wooden desks, with broken piping and heaps of refuse lying about.
"You know, it's ironic," he grins, "but in the last century, this
used to be a sweatshop."
Burnout is now commonplace enough that the savvier managers and
employees try to put limits on the workaholic vibes by instilling
old-fashioned rigor: Get in by 10:00, out no later than 7:00. At
Funny Garbage, for example, Girardi says he rewards results, not the
sheer number of work hours. At Pseudo, Fortuna has achieved enough
seniority that he pulled back on his hours, and now works from home
two days a week.
If there's an archetypal success story, it's probably that of
Jeff Dachis and Razorfish. In spring 1995, Dachis and his friend
Craig Kanarick, both in their late 20s, founded the Web site design
company in their living rooms. Within a year, they had nabbed such
clients as Time Warner and PepsiCo. Known for clean but edgy design,
the outfit grew exponentially. Last year, they had 350 employees in
eight offices and did $30 million in business.
Companies like Razorfish have built the mythos of gold-rush
success: Start a firm in your garage, wow the senior executives at
Fortune 500 companies, then take occasional breaks from your
PlayStation to watch the dough roll in. "The trappings of power have
changed," wrote Time magazine in an October 1997 survey of the
"cyber-elite," heralding its "brazen encouragement to outthink the
status quo, to invent a thousand possible futures." But here, too,
hype far outstrips reality.
Consider pay. A 1997 New York New Media Association study
revealed that high-tech jobs paid an average of $37,212--middling at
best for a city as expensive as New York, and far outstripped by
average New York salaries in advertising ($71,637), periodicals
($69,849), and TV broadcasting ($85,938).
The churn rate is amazingly high. As the New York study found,
almost half the city's new-media work is freelance or part time;
two-thirds of the freelance contracts last fewer than six months,
and most are three-month stints. What this means, of course, is that
many digital workers have no employer-supported health care. New
media is expanding by essentially passing its costs on to those on
the bottom rungs--all in the name of "flexibility."
Replacing decent pay and regular work is the lure of instant
wealth--fabled stock options that turned the Amazon.com and
TheGlobe.com creators into multimillionaires. It's a seductive
pitch; those who have won the game have won big.
The payoff, though, is about as chimerical as you can get. Most
high-tech headhunters counsel their clients that the chance of
getting lucrative options is slim. "To cash in on stock, you have to
stick around for several years," says Alex Santic, head of Silicon
Alley Connections, "but few people really want to. They want to move
on after a year. They get lured in by the promise of stock but
rarely see it through."
Perhaps the most persistent myth is that of the "programmer
shortage." According to this tale, geeks now run the show, and
companies are fighting tooth and nail over warm bodies. "Business
leaders say the shortage has reached near-crisis proportions," wrote
The Washington Post in a recent article detailing--with a sort of
horrified fascination--incredible perks offered to lure programmers,
from "signing bonuses like professional athletes" to $70-an-hour
rates for temporary work.
But last year, University of California professor Norman Matloff
released a rare study of software and new-media firm hiring
practices. He concluded there was no shortage of programmers; in
fact, companies were hiring only 2 to 4 percent of people they
interviewed, a rate far below that for other types of engineers. The
shortage, Matloff realized, wasn't in programmers per se; it was in
young, unattached programmers, those willing to clock 100-hour weeks
for comparatively low salaries (a national average of $40,000).
But as NetSlaves creator Bill Lessard found out, nobody in new
media really wants to hear this story. Lessard did his time: In 1995
he was hired as a content producer and bulletin-board manager at
Pathfinder, Time Warner's Web site, which touted itself as a
cultural hotspot. The young staff governed themselves accordingly:
hanging out, sleeping together, almost neverleaving the office. "It
was a dorm in there," Lessard says. He fled in 1996.
By then, Lessard's friends were telling him horror stories about
their jobs. So he and Steve Baldwin decided to compile a book on the
subject. They collected dozens of interviews, and, given the boom in
Internet-related books, figured they'd have no trouble attracting
interest. Publisher after publisher declined their proposal.
"They'd say it wasn't upbeat enough and that nobody would want to
read about this," Lessard says. Eventually, even their agent gave
up. With nowhere else to go, they turned their project into--what
else?--the NetSlaves Web site (www.disobey.com/netslaves).
It's surprising that today's young workers, so self-reflective,
so otherwise fluent in irony, would buy into the myth of "liberated"
digital work. Not that all new-media jobs are unmitigatingly
horrible; they're considerably better paid and more challenging than
the minimum-wage tedium that passes for most people's work in North
America. But what's intriguing is that new-media employees are so
desperate to believe that they are not, in fact, workers--that their
work can be play, that they can control it, and that their employers
are bending over backward to please them. Instead of the other way
around.