The NYT has a story on Google's new offices in Manhattan, where they're almost partying like it's 1999.
From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.
The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.
The New York tradition of leaving the office to network over lunch or an evening cocktail party has no place at Google, where employees are encouraged to socialize among themselves. There are groups of Gayglers, Newglers and Bikeglers (who bike to work together). Every Thursday afternoon there is a gathering with wine and beer called Thank God It’s Almost Friday (originally it was a T.G.I.F. event, modeled after one in Mountain View, but Googlers in New York didn’t want to stick around late on a Friday). ...
The strategy of keeping employees happy and committed to spending endless hours on campus seems to be working. Richard Burdon, 37, an engineer who joined Google two years ago, has been staying past midnight to prepare for the introduction of a project. (Google’s Manhattan engineers have been responsible for developing Google Maps and are working on some 100 other projects.)
“Google is about as interesting as starting your own startup because you can really follow your own ideas,” said Mr. Burdon, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs, Sony and I.B.M. The only time he could remember leaving the office during the workday was to buy a friend a birthday present.
The article mentioned some of the parties held back in the day: "During New York’s original dot-com boom, the entrepreneur Josh Harris of Pseudo.com was known for decadent parties in his loft offices that featured live sex shows."
And when I saw that, my memory banks twitched and coughed something up. That something was a seminal late-1990s article in Shift magazine called Why Your Fabulous Job Sucks.
PULLING ALL-NIGHTERS, DESTROYING YOUR EYESIGHT, PLAYING QUAKE ON the company LAN, hanging out in a funky office with your dog: In the modern digital workplace, this sort of stuff is de rigueur. Indeed, for young Turks in new media-- software, website development or the amorphous zone of "content" --aggressively casual and freewheeling is the signature office style.
On the surface, it has to do with making work seem a lot more fun and thus a lot less like a job. It is, as it were, the master narrative of the New Work, which we could sketch out like this: Young digital workers, we're told, demand a more creative and accommodating work environment. They have thrown off the stuffy, nine-to-five straightjacket in which their parents so miserably toiled. No more suits and ties, no more rigid corporate hierarchies, no more dull, repetitive tasks. Today, work means getting to wear your Star Wars T-shirt, sport your multiple piercings and hang out in an office with homey perks: massage-therapist visits, pets, wacky furniture, toys and lots of beer. The staff dines together and parties together; it works hard, sure, but it plays hard, too, and usually at the same time. And the workers aren't chained to any one job; instead, they bop at will 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.
It's a story that has fascinated the media. Reporters covering the industry regularly marvel at the scenes of controlled chaos and pop-cultural riot, the offices transformed from grey ranks of veal-fattening pens into bohemian venues with all the ambience of an elite club. At New York's Razorfish, the staff caps off frantic all-nighters by hitting the powder en masse for a weekend of snowboarding. At Mountain View, California's Netscape, staff members are willing to quit if they can't bring their dogs to work. And as USA Today 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.
The studied hipness of new media is a fascinating and rather devious cultural illusion. Those ultra-cool offices cover up a seldom-discussed truth: That the jobs themselves are often deeply exploitative, demanding intense work and devotion for relatively low pay and zero security. Ironically, the coolness of the new-media workplace is an essential part of the exploitation. By making work more like play, employers neatly erase the division between the two, which ensures that their young employees will almost never leave the office.
And it's true: High-tech employees hang out at work for hours, long after the city has gone to bed. They'll kill themselves over deadlines, putting in up to eighty hours a week and pulling all-nighters at the drop of a hat. And instead of going justifiably postal over these crazy workloads (or unionizing), they'll smile and thank their lucky stars for being part of the digital revolution, the cultural flashpoint of the nineties. For employers, of course, it's a sweet deal; you can't buy flexibility like that. As more than one worker has told me, a website design company can almost always hold a meeting at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon because, well, everyone's there. Where else would they be?
But for all the talk of easy-going, accommodating environments, new-media companies are notorious for employee burnout and nanosecond turnover. It's not surprising: Given the insane hours, the payoffs are rather slim. We are hit relentlessly with media hype about digital workers' high pay, desirability and stock options. But none of these myths holds up under the slightest 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 getting offered any stock anywhere. As for programmers, most are paid surprisingly little and are hurled overboard as soon as they hit their mid-thirties.
Which brings me to this graf from the NYT story:
At lunch on a recent afternoon in the Hemispheres cafeteria, the two major Googler factions, engineers and sales representatives, tended to sit segregated at long tables. It was easy to tell them apart: engineers wore jeans, T-shirts and sneakers; sales representatives wore suits, no tie. There was nary a designer handbag or gray hair in the room (emphasis mine - BD).
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!