I've been working in the Silicon Valley area for a bit over a decade. You know, the Silicon Valley that's waiting with bated breath for a new gusher of money to come from the Obama Administration to fund - get this - "Green" Jobs and "Green" Research! (Yes, the quotes are my mini-meme for this piece.)
I submit that the American "Green" industry, specifically that centered in the community of Silicon Valley, is a fraud. Traffic needlessly chokes the freeways every day. The inversion layer over the Valley turns it into a smoggy brown soup on hot days. Now they want Green jobs? Please.
But that's only the context, not the primary thesis, for what I have to say.
I'm sick of the BS. Hey. Obama! You want to do something that would seriously have an impact on carbon emissions and the quality of life for everyone on this country? I got a simple idea. Get those cars off the road!
Why the Heck do we need all this Meatspace, anyway?
Think about the sheer quantity of carbon, chemicals and ozone that are used and generated by all those expensive office buildings!
...and all those people, including myself, clogging roads to get to that aforementioned meatspace.
The government should mandate that all companies, where practical, support and encourage telecommuting a minimum of two days a week. In fact, a good approach would be to divide city regions into separate telecommuting precincts, where all qualifying workers are consistently taken off the roads on specific days. My definition of "qualifying" means that people whose jobs absolutely require physical presence, like factory assemblers (if there are any left after this recession), bus drivers and cops, obviously would not be able to do this.
There is no reason that anyone in a knowledge-based field, such as many technology companies, financial services companies and pretty much any other office-based enterprise, should not be able to do this. Best Buy and HP have proven that it works.
If companies fight this or don't do it, for whatever reason, why there's your new Carbon Tax! Penalize companies who don't cooperate in the place that hurts them most.
Think about the benefits of getting, possibly, 40% of all cars off the freeways every day:
- A dramatic decrease in carbon emissions from car-based transport, by far the single biggest contributor to global warming;
- A more efficient commute for those who HAVE to drive, thereby saving even more in emissions;
- Less wear and tear on the infrastructure (this is obviously hard to quantify);
- Less commuting stress, which over time may translate into the benefits of fewer visits to the doctor or psychiatrist;
- The potential for increased productivity since workers don't have to spend significant chunks of their working hours sitting in a car;
- The potential for company cost savings on facilities;
- Potential drops in fuel consumption and prices;
- An enhanced quality of life for remote workers, including more time with their families.
Now, I know that the last point is not a priority for corporate execs and managers in Silicon Valley, or really for pretty much every American corporation. I know this from some experience. An example: in my last job interview, practically the first question out of the CEO's mouth was "so why don't you live in the immediate area?" Of course, there really is no good answer to that question, and at that moment I knew I wouldn't get the job. I had a few responses go through my mind:
- Duh, because in my family, we made the decision to be a single-earner household so our kids had a chance to grow up with a parent in the home?
- Um, because even with property values dropping, even crummy homes are still way out of reach of the average local salary?
- Uh, because I wasn't standing around with a bucket in my hands the day it rained gold, you rich #&%#*$(#*@?
Promptly killing what fading chance I had, I actually told the truth and answered (1) (while being sorely tempted to pick Door #3!). In the Valley, virtually every family, renting or owning, is dual-income. But our values are different.
Regarding the region I know most about, the average 3/2 home in the area costs $750,000 or so. This is down from the $1.1M in the bubble days. Still, $750K ain't exactly cheap. It's out of the reach of most people unless both parents/spouses work and take home a six-figure income. That's just a fact.
Conversely, normal people, with normal lives, cannot afford to live in the immediate Bay Area. So what do they do? Like me, they face hours of commuting to work from outlying areas such as Sonoma County, Tracy, Hollister, Modesto, Santa Cruz and Capitola, the Sierra foothills and many other places that barely meet the definition of "Bay Area" (or don't at all) but are the places where a normal family at least has a chance of buying a single-family house without going into hopeless hock for the rest of their lives. So we clog up the roads in order to be able to say, "Yay, I'm a member of the team!" While our arteries harden and our legs cramp, and our gym membership goes unused, and our kids are stuck in crowded after-school programs, or our families might as well be single-parent households.
Of course, the Bay Area is in no way unique. I've read terrifying stories about commuters to Manhattan having to live in frackin' Pennsylvania and leaving the house at 3:30 in the morning to be at their job by 8. Piecing together a commute from three or four separate transportation systems, some of these people spend literally a third of their lives getting to and from work. Unfortunately, in many cases the jobs these folks have to go to are not the kind that can be done remotely. Nevertheless, in such a situation, your children virtually never see you. Forget volunteering in your child's school, or going to the school play that they're in, or having a parent-teacher conference. Or even feeding and getting them dressed in the morning. In our modern root-hog-or-die economy, children are a luxury.
In and around Atlanta, some people live hours away from work, in Alabama or Tennessee. With absolutely no public transportation system worth the name, these breadwinners must brave a 3-4 hour drive across state lines every day to get to work. On jammed freeways! Atlanta is also known as one of the very worst city commutes in the United States.
This pattern, which is now repeated across the country, tears at the very fabric of our society and feeds the pathologies of child neglect, divorce, domestic abuse, and bad health resulting from the baleful effects of 4-6 daily hours behind the wheel.
For this and many other reasons, life in California and in many other parts of America is unsustainable, child- and family-unfriendly, and ruled by an oligarchy of fat cats who profess to be shocked when they encounter someone who doesn't share their munificent lifestyle. That CEO I interviewed with was worth north of half-a-billion dollars, and he had the nerve to quiz me about my decision to live in a place I could afford, instead of being a renter and living in a crappy school district so my wife and I could be good cogs in the machine. Many Silicon Valley companies could easily handle having most of their staff telecommuting full-time. But many workers, even quite senior ones such as myself, are forced into situations where we must drive 3-4 hours a day.
If the Obama Administration is serious about fostering change and progress in this country, it's time to walk the walk. Global warming is no joke. Without major adjustments in our approach to workplace organization, mandated by government, I cannot see how any number of "Green Jobs" can make any significant difference. Not in the Atlanta littoral, the Greater New York area, the deserts of Southern California and Phoenix or the sweltering cities of the Central Valley where people commute to Cisco or their early-round startup because they weren't fortunate enough to cash in during the now-long-gone IPO booms of Silicon Valley.
Government mandates for telecommuting are an idea whose time has more than come. Hey, Barack - you talked a lot about CHANGE during the election. Here's a good place to make a major impact on the most significant issue of our time. Not to mention a beneficial impact, potentially, on millions of people.
Hiring managers and company executives would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to do this, and may even go so far as to threaten mass firings and offshoring because of it. (Not that this would matter too much in the Valley, where an American engineer is as rare as an unclogged freeway! Offshoring is Silicon Valley's biggest export commodity.) I propose to address this on two levels:
- Make receipt of "Green" funds contingent on all job positions, that don't involve physical labor, receive and implement a two-day minimum telecommuting policy;
- Any Silicon Valley or other American tech company taking Federal "Green" stimulus funds must hire American. Period. No negotiation. No exceptions.
(Aside from that, it's also time to do away with the H1-B visa and go to a points-based immigration system like those used in Canada, Australia and many other places. Another subject for another time.)
Without these reforms, "Green" Policy is hogwash. It's just pork-barrel spending with a tech veneer which will not even benefit jobless Americans. Tech companies, and American companies in general, are peopled by men who do not understand that their normal way of doing business is not only no longer sustainable; it's also bad business and bad for the country. Adding that it's also bad for their workers (or the country, for that matter) presumes that they actually care about them, which is hopelessly naive.
([Rant] One last tangential point - Silicon Valley is hyped as being so innovative and so technically progressive and so culturally enlightened. Which is all a bunch of baloney. No one does anything different anymore. Many of these vaunted startups are run by obscenely rich people whose only pursuit now is to further accumulate money they could never spend in a dozen lifetimes. These people start security and routing/switching and packet-gobbling companies where absolutely no innovation takes place; there are a dozen or two individual companies pursuing EVERY SINGLE MARKET NICHE in the security and traffic management fields, and the only differentiator between them is their marketing collateral, where their Baby Boomer marketing thralls (pretty much the only American workers at many of these companies, I might add, in my consistent experience) desperately labor to show how unique their company's cookie-cutter product is. It's lily-gilding on a massive scale. The Silicon Valley culture is amoral and permeated with arrogance and greed. The romance of freebooting innovation ended a long time ago. [/end rant])
I think the hyped-up "Green" jobs are a chimera. They will be nowhere near enough to replace the massive losses we are suffering in the job market through layoffs and offshoring - not a year from now, not five years from now, perhaps not ever. I think throwing federal dollars at Silicon Valley to promote "Green" research and jobs is a fat-cat subsidy, and that the money will simply disappear without any significant gain in jobs, technology advances or in productivity. In fact, the companies receiving this money already have the attitude that Americans can't do the job, so they'll simply hire more skilled foreign labor on H1-B visas to do the R&D and production. Not only that, but they'll gradually offshore those jobs to India and China, along with the R&D knowledge that American taxpayers paid for! Nothing will come of all of this except that some fat cats will get even fatter. Don't agree? Go talk to a venture capitalist sometime. In tech and green fields, every single one of them requires an offshoring policy as a condition of funding agreements.
Of course, since Silicon Valley was the first financial power base to substantially support the Obama campaign, I suppose I should not be surprised.
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of handouts to rich people. In fact, I want to soak them.
Silicon Valley is one of the wealthiest communities in the world. Explain to me again why these guys deserve Federal largesse? Not one freakin' dime to these people.