Yellow Pants

Yellow Pants

Jumpstart for 3/20/10-4


     Ian just doesn't the the idea of flying under the wire," said, John, my thoughtful, but hyperactive co-worker. Ian was his 10 year old son who was having troubles at school. "He keeps wearing yellow pants to school." The three of us, John, Scott and I trekked through San Francisco's 10-block high-tech district on the prowl for a lunchtime burrito. We were technical writers for a software start-up housed in a glass and steel building overlooking San Francisco's only canal. A block away, the SF Giants battled the LA Dodgers at ATT park.
     John used the expression, "flying under the wire," to describe the high-tech corporate work we do, translating the arcane technology of computer scientists into instructions comprehensible by customers. To fly under the wire is to come to the office, do your work quietly and no draw attention to yourself. "You gotta lay low," he would say, "so you don't get hit by a stray bullet." Then he would list the names of people at the company who didn't lay low, and ended up getting RIF'd--Reduction in Force--laid off.

     Start-ups are the glamour companies of high technology. Every Google, Apple, Microsoft, Youtube and Facebook began as a start-up. The Grandaddy of them all, Hewlett-Packard, invented the concept of the start-up concept in the 1930s and became the early paradigm. The Palo Alto garage where Bill and Dave--names known by every technology worker in Silicon Valley--started the company is a shrine to technology companies everywhere.
     The glamour of start-ups is the idea that with a good idea, hard work, generous stock options and luck, not only can a young college graduate (Steve Ballmer, Jerry Wang) or college drop-out (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) can become a billionaire, but many hundreds of the early hires can become millionaires. This dream of high-tech lucre drives young employees to work 60 to 100 hour weeks and give up huge swathes of their twenties. However, with the long hours and high-pressure, start-ups, especially those not immediately successful, experience a lot of employee churn--the hiring, firing, quitting and replacement of its skilled workers.

     The place where the three of us worked was old for a start-up. It had been founded, like most start-ups, by three graduate students from Stanford. The company had some interesting technology--software that analyzed software--but never got over the hump and went public with their stock so that workers could cash in their options. It spent its history on the cusp of success, toiling as if, just over the horizon, IPO Valhalla lay if everyone could just work a little harder and smarter.
     Though the dream of IPO riches drove many through the long soul-crushing work weeks, and equal number of us, John and I among them, just wanted a decent job. In any case, this little company made enough money to pay its employees well and rent a sexy office building on the San Francisco Bay. The work environment, however, was infused with tension and a very high employee churn. Unless you were a technical superstar or a 60 hour a week true believer, flying under the wire was a decent strategy for keeping your job.

     Our burritos were still a few blocks away, and John was still rolling. “Ian likes to wear yellow pants,” he repeated. “The girls like it too. They think it shows style. But the 7th grade boys throw basketballs at him when he rides his bike to school. They call him 'piss pants.' I don't want to quash his style, but I told him if he just wore blue jeans he could just fly under the wire. He hears me, but he just doesn't get it.”
     Yellow pants. In September 1968 my mother bought me a pair of yellow pants when I was in 7th grade. I hated them. Over the summer, a growth spurt had rendered all my old grade school pants impossibly small. My thrifty Mom, who no doubt purchased the pants at a 50% off sale at JC Penney's, brought them into my room and laid them on the bed. I was speechless, and, unfortunately, pantless except for the yellow disaster that lay before me. It was Monday morning and school was ten blocks away. I pulled on the yellow pants and ran out he front door. First flak came from my best friend across the street with whom I walked to school every day. “Hey! Look at those pants! Are those your dancing pants? Cool fancy dancing pants, man!” He began dancing an absurd middle school dance that mocked my yellow pants. I had no retort and walked to school in dread and silence.
     In the hierarchy of childhood traumas, the humiliation of a 7th grade boy forced to wear yellow pants to his middle school is not very high, but unlike Ian I was not aware enough to notice if any girls liked those pants or not. As soon as I could, I ditched the yellow pants, and they remained only in the dust heap of bad adolescent memories.
     At the time of our burrito excursion, I was a contractor at the start-up. Each day I rode the train into the City, laid low in my fox hole for 8 hours, then rode the train back home. Contractors are non-permanent employees and are the most expendable and easily laid off. We don't get the perks of regular employees--stock options, insurance, matching 401K plans--but we do get a high hourly pay rate. Still, all contractors have a relatively short expiration date. As the completion of a crucial deadline approached, along the inevitable end of my contract, I asked my boss if I could continue working part time “as long as the company needed me.” It wasn't a great job, but I needed the money.
     “Ok,” she said. Then she promptly forgot the conversation.
     On the day after the deadline she said, “I guess I'll need to get your badge and computer today.”
     
Whaaat?!?! “Um. You said I could work part-time until you didn't have any more work.”
     “Oh,” she said, “I thought you meant part time up until today.”
     “Um. No.”
     A couple of palm-sweating hours later she returned and said that she had talked to her boss and that I could stay until there was no more work. “Great!” I said, relieved. Then I left for the weekend, thinking I'd fly under the wire for at least a couple more months.

     On Monday I arrived at the office prepared to work, but without the pressure of a deadline there was nothing or urgency. I shuffled electronic papers for a while, but by mid-morning a slow realization began to sink in: I had no work to do. I left the office and took a walk around the canal to think: if I asked my boss for work, and she couldn't think of anything, then we would each be looking at each other knowing there was no reason to keep me around.
     In mid-afternoon I stared blankly at my computer screen while my boss, who sat 3 feet away separated only by a small fabric-covered press board divider, clicked busily on her keyboard. My strategy of flying under the wire sputtered like a dying airplane engine. I took another walk along the canal and watched part of the Giant's game on the jumbotron that could be seen outside the stadium. At least those guys have work, I thought glumly. At 5 o'clock I left in a hurry to get to the train station.
     The next day I returned to the slow inevitability of getting canned from my job. After another walk around the canal, I realized that in addition to dread, I felt bored. No one likes to sit in an office chair pretending to do work--do it too long and you lose your soul and become a working zombie. When I returned to the office, for the hell of it, I started reading the oldest fattest technical manual in the company. It was as incomprehensible and as inscrutable as a Zen koan. Like many technical manuals, it was so old and unexamined that its existence had been taken for granted and its unreadability had become ignored. "What a pain for new customers to have to read this," I thought.
     I paged through the manual shaking my head and jotting down questions: What does this mean? How does it work? Why do I have to know this? Obvious questions, but questions not asked unless you analyze this stuff for a living.
     I told my boss about the book. "This manual sucks," I said, then I listed its problems.
     "Interesting," she said. "Andy mentioned the same thing in a meeting I was at today."
     Andy was the Chief Technology Officer of the company. He was a Big Deal. "Maybe," I said, "I could write up some of the problems and see what he thinks." Like many underlings in the company, my boss tried to shield the CTO from interruptions, but to my surprise she said, "Ok."
     I had an ulterior motive for sending an email to Andy. If I could articulate an interesting significant problem--computer programmers think in terms of interesting problems and their counterpart, the elegant solution--maybe I could scratch some work out of this. But to do this, I had to come out of my foxhole and wave a red flag over the problem. I had to convince the technical guru of the company that this interesting problem required an elegant solution by a true visionary—me. That was the first part of the problem. The second part involved deep diving into the guts of excruciatingly esoteric technology and capture it in elegant and clear prose. The creators of this software were computer science PhDs from Stanford. I was a creative writing major/casino card counter from a little college in Lake Tahoe Nevada. To pull this off I had to believe that I was as smart as them--albeit in a different way--and a far superior writer. There would be no flying under the wire for this project. I had to wear the yellow pants.
     That evening I composed a long email to Andy outlining my thoughts and ideas. People don't read long emails in corporate America. They don't have time, or they think that the writer has not taken the time to be concise. This, however, was a complex issue that required my best and most persuasive writing. The first draft was many hundreds of words. Then, like Michelangelo sculpting David, I took my editorial chisel and removed everything that wasn't my vision. After a couple of hours, my David of a technical email was finished. I sent it off.
     The next day, Andy read it and responded! He agreed with my findings and suggested I consult with a couple of software architects. I wrote them immediately.

     In the world of high-technology, the left brain rules. Everything of value--things that make money--start from the brains of extremely intelligent and creative engineers. Near the top of the engineering pyramid are developers, engineers who design and create the features and products you use in, say, email, Adobe Illustrator or the Google search engine. Higher up the pyramid are the software architects who, like exalted Egyptian priests, deign to look at someone's technical problem and/or solution, then render a judgment (elegant solution). Above them are the Distinguished Engineers, who have reached such an elevated level of technical genius that they are seen as Christ-like technical figures who have come to this earthly to show regular engineers the Technical Way. Think Steve Wozniak.
     On the other hand, a company cannot thrive on only left brains. Silicon Valley is littered with dead companies that were controlled by left-brain types who couldn't see the forest because they were focused on a single technical tree. It takes a good right-brained marketing guy to make a company work. Think Steve Jobs.
     The position of technical writer is a weird hybrid between the creative and the technical. On one hand you had to be somewhat creative to figure out how to capture technology in elegant structured prose. On the other hand, you often had to understand extremely complex left-brain technology to capture it. Because of this weird position in the industry, technical writers, often become the kicking dogs of high-tech engineering world. Not technical enough to run with the engineers and not ambitious enough to to kick with the marketing geeks, it's where liberal arts majors go to get a job. The technical writing world has become a computer ghetto of poets, novelists, musicians, painters, activists and lit majors. Many of us do our time, fly under the wire, then go home and try do our own art--make music, take photographs, write poems, do volunteer work, be a great parent.
     Normally software architects ignore email from technical writers, but with Andy's name on the cc line, they paid attention. They argued with my premise, my findings, my grammar, but eventually found salient points on which they could latch on to. Other engineers were drawn into the discussion which soon turned into a company-wide technical debate.
     High tech companies work like that. Once an interesting and useful problem in introduced, the engineering brains of the company argue over the best way to solve it. The best argument prevails and that solution is developed. The key is to articulate an interesting and useful problem. As a writer, however, I was not in the position to argue for a solution. Instead my position was to mediate and gather arguments from various solutions and weave them into a singular useful solution. As arguments ensued, I took the best ideas and integrated it into a compelling vision.
     One morning as I sat at my computer, I nodded to John who just arrived. Before he could settle himself in for a day of work, his manager and his manager's manager called him into a meeting. Ten minutes later he returned to his desk, shaken, and picked up his things. "See you later," he said.
     He quickly walked out the door, but I chased after him and caught him outside. "What's going on?" I said.
     "Got laid, off, man" he said, not looking at me. "It's ok. I'll see you later." Then he walked off.
     The rest of the day was lost. John was right, you could get shot at any time at that place. But it didn't matter if you were laying low or not. I sat at my desk in a daze and left work early.
     The next day, however, I got back to it. I wrote emails, called meetings, walked into engineers offices to gather information. New thoughts and ideas came forth, and I layered them into the vision. At any moment, I felt like I could catch a bullet. No matter, I stood up for my ideas and argued forcefully for them, integrated new ones. Soon I was given time and resources to make the vision happen. A few weeks into the project, my boss, the one who carried my bullet around with her at all times, said, "Hey, good job."
     I don't want Ian to get basketballs thrown at him, but I also don't want to to quash his style for 40 years. Sometimes, a man just has to wear the yellow pants.