This New Internet Thing, Chapter 12

The Price of Success

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 11, all the characters got together on a boat trip, and Len started figuring out how this Silicon Valley stuff worked. Janet is a major executive at 3Com and realizes that she hates this management stuff. Her husband Walt doesn’t quite understand this. He did hate being dragged to a management “party” with her, though.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

============ The Price of Success =================

After the fishing trip and Dad’s visit, Janet had a horrible Monday. Her weekly meeting with her peers on the management team started out bad and went downhill fast. Patrick, the VP of Marketing spoke confidently, like every other VP of Marketing she’d ever known.

Then came the moment she dreaded; Patrick complimented her on 3Com’s excellent internal network. She smiled, expecting there would be more. There was. He said he had some questions and suggestions for her, and could she meet with him after the meeting and go over them? Of course she could.

It got worse, though. They went around the room, and Jerry, the VP of Sales, reported on their results so far this quarter. Hardware adapters were selling like hotcakes, as usual, but he knew that management wanted him to sell “systems.” He was supposed to sell large packages of servers, 3Stations (those diskless workstations that no one wanted), Bridge routers, and LAN Manager software, not just the “onesie/twosie” sales that actually paid the bills.

Those were large, complicated sales that took a year or more to complete. A single mid-level manager didn’t have the budgetary authority to buy that. So Jerry had to organize a whole sales team and come back over and over again to present his story, all the while his competition was doing the same thing. He might invest a year in some prospect and then lose the deal. He hated it and so did his salespeople, who only wanted easy deals.

Janet had heard this over and over again, and she got almost physically ill when a VP of Sales said they were “transitioning the salesforce.” When the Xerox Star was coming out, “transitioning the salesforce” to sell the Star was the big story. Then she was young and naïve enough to believe it.

Now Jerry said that at every management meeting. Except now that everyone was tired of hearing it, he was looking for someone else to blame. Naturally, Janet’s department was convenient. So she had to meet with Jerry after the meeting, too, so they could “brainstorm” on things to help his sales teams when they were at a customer site. She wondered if there was a special school where executives learned to use management jargon like “transitioning” and “brainstorm.” But Janet had gotten very good at hiding her feelings in public.

Even though Kristen the HR lady had left after the great email debacle (Janet had fallen into the habit of calling her Miss Smarmy, after hearing it from Dan and Matt for years), the new HR people were just as bad. They seemed to have insinuated themselves into everything at the company. An HR representative sat in on almost every meeting, even if it had no obvious HR subject matter. Their function, as far as she could tell, was to assess who was Up and who was Down in the popularity charts this week. 

She didn’t even bother mentioning “the Internet” at these meetings any more, because she didn’t want to get a reputation as a kook. These people all thought it was just some academic thing, and no serious business person was ever going to use it. She was going to have to find some way of getting into it other than her regular job, and if that meant leaving 3Com, so be it.

That night, Walt was already home when she got there. Bernie the Bernese Mountain Dog nearly knocked her down in his excitement.

“Hey, how was your day?” he called out from the couch.

She made a face, said “Yuck!” and went to change clothes. When she came out, she sat next to him and he put his arm around her.

“Tell me about it.”

She was silent for a long time. It was so nice just snuggling with Walt. Bernie curled up on the couch next to them. Finally,

“I’m so sick of that place. It gets more and more bureaucratic every time I turn around. You don’t really notice it at first.”

“Hmm. So you’re thinking about leaving?”

She thought for a minute. “Maybe. I don’t know where I’d go, though.”

Walt didn’t try to suggest anything. This wasn’t his area. In contracting, you’d just ask “Who else is hiring?” but this was a different world, and she didn’t expect an answer from him.

“What would you do if you could do anything?”

“Anything?” she said. “I’m not even sure it would involve computers at all!”

Walt laughed. “Whoa there! You’re making pretty good money doing whatever it is you do.”

She laughed, too. “Yeah, just kidding. I don’t know. It would be nice to make so much money we really could do anything.”

“Is that realistic, though? I mean, you hear about people like that, but I don’t know any.”

She thought back to that conversation about startups at the 1981 National Computer Conference, where they introduced the Xerox Star.

“There are startups where you get a lot of stock. Dan was at one. But it’s kinda hit-and-miss whether you get rich or not. Mostly not.”

Walt had heard all this before, but not in any detail, so he was curious.

“But you still get your regular salary, right? Or do you have to take a cut?”

“Nowadays, they get venture capital funding, so they can pay everyone’s regular salary.”

“OK. So it sounds like a win. You still get paid, I mean… even if you don’t get rich.”

She remembered what Dan told her about his startup, and what she’d heard about the early days of Apple and 3Com.

“Yeah. It’s different, though. You know you could go bankrupt at any time.”

Walt laughed. “Hell, I have that every day! Half of my clients, you don’t know if you’re ever gonna get paid!”

“I don’t know how you do it, honey,” she said, squeezing his thigh

They sat for a few minutes. Janet closed her eyes and mused on how nice it was to have a husband who didn’t think he knew better than she did.

Finally, Walt said, “So do you really want to work at one of those startups?”

“I don’t know. It’s pretty intense. You wouldn’t see me very much!”

Walt considered that.

“Hmm. I don’t know… how long does that go on? Until you make it?”

She snorted. “Or fail. Or worse, become one of those zombie companies.”

He looked puzzled, and she continued, “Those are the ones that haven’t failed or succeeded. On life support until they finally pull the plug.”

Walt felt like he’d said all he could at this point. Janet didn’t feel like there was anything more to say, either. But she’d already made her decision, although she hadn’t realized it until now:

She had had it with managing. Everyone thought she was good at it, and she probably was. She knew how to keep her feelings to herself in big meetings, to never put the big executive on the spot in front of other people, and to always use management buzzwords like “teamwork” and “align” without being too blatant about it. This must have been the part that her Dad couldn’t pull off in his career. When she was a kid, he tried to hide that he was still pissed off when he got home from work, but she could tell.

Her favorite part was helping her underlings develop in their careers and get promoted. Like Cassie. Most of all, she always seemed to be calm and in control without being bossy, and that was why people looked up to her.

But that was old hat now, and she was sick to death of being constantly interrupted no matter what she was doing. Being the big boss, or even the medium boss, meant that everyone felt they had a claim on your time and you always had to be available to them.

Even worse, your inbox and your voicemail box was constantly full of messages from people who wanted something. It might not be your job to do it — in fact, it almost never was, but you were still expected to find the right person and make sure it got done. And today’s management meeting really drove it home: all these incredibly stupid people whom you had to pretend to take seriously. And most of them would stab you in the back if they saw even the slightest advantage for themselves.

She thought of what Matt Feingold had said to her when he left 3Com, “You could be VP of Engineering anywhere you want nowadays.” At the time that statement left her vaguely uncomfortable, and now she knew why: she didn’t want that job.

What would she have to do as VP Engineering in a startup? Speak to countless hordes of investors, interviewees, customers, and press and give the same spiel over and over. Convince them to join the company, give money, write about you, or God knows what else. Sit in endless meetings, all day and every day.

In return, you got invited to do it even more, in even bigger venues, for more and more money. What was the point? Walt didn’t want that rich-person life, at all. 

He’d made that very clear the time she’d dragged him to a “mandatory fun” event as her husband. It was a “pool party” in someone’s backyard, and you didn’t have to swim but it was strongly encouraged. The other attendees were other VPs and Directors from all over the company, and it was catered by the chefs from Osteria in Palo Alto. There were attractive young people circulating with trays of Margaritas and white wine.

Naturally, everyone wanted to meet Janet’s husband. While they were checking out the water temperature in the pool, Patrick, the VP of Marketing introduced himself:

“Hi, I’m Patrick Logan.” Walt stood up and shook Patrick’s hand.

Janet said, “Walt, Patrick is my colleague in Marketing.”

Walt said, “Nice to meet you, Patrick. Are you new to the Valley?”

“No, this is my third job out of Stanford. How about you? Did you go to school around here?”

Walt knew that “school” meant “college” to someone like Patrick, and he was trying to find out what college Walt had gone to. He decided to leave him guessing.

“Yeah, I did. Long time ago, though. So are you going in the water?”

Patrick looked nonplussed. “No, I never really liked to swim. Hey, it was nice meeting you, Walt.” and he drifted off.

All Walt’s conversations seemed to start out like this. It was always “where did you go to college?” or “what do you do for a living?” Some of the more persistent ones bored in until they figured out that he didn’t finish college. Then when they found out he was in construction, they wanted his business card. He had to admit that was sorta nice for his business, but still, he found the whole thing tedious, like he didn’t belong in this crowd and didn’t even like them.

“Management” was always painted as a one-way street for young programmers: you graduated to being a manager, and eventually you didn’t write code anymore, and pretty soon you couldn’t even if you wanted to. If you were very lucky, you became the CEO of something, which was like being the Duke of whatever in a 19th Century European country.

If you were not one of those Dukes, you became one of those migrant VPs or Directors, who wait until a startup goes public and then sell themselves as the “professional management the company needs now,” with “a proven track record of success.” There were always lots of them around.

Yuck. So could she return to being a regular engineer and write code again? That was going to take some doing.

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There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.

Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.

There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, where you read the real story if there is one.