Cyber-Geeks Try to Hack High-Class Ways
The geeks are growing up. Growing up, and getting manners.
Time was--and not too long ago, either--when manners in the Silicon Valley were a rather low-key affair. Proper etiquette consisted of offering a potato chip to the guy in the next cubicle. If you used paper plates with the takeout pizza, well, that was the height of civility.
No more.
It seems that wealth--lots and lots of it--has inspired some changes in this valley built on Jolt cola and junk food.
Computer whizes still work insane hours, to be sure. And some still take pride in being called geeks. But increasingly, they are stepping out to fine restaurants and formal dinner parties. And learning that they can conduct business just as well over shrimp cocktail as over a bag of vending machine Chee-tos.
“The image of high-tech nerds sitting around their desks eating Chinese food out of boxes is not quite true anymore,” said Doug Henton, who as president of the Collaborative Economics consulting firm makes a point of tracking such trends.
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More people are closing deals over meals, Hollywood-style. One high-tech analyst explained the appeal this way: “You’re multi-tasking. You’re doing two things at once.” Henton had his own take on the trend: “There’s a wealth effect,” he said, “that’s starting to affect people.”
And no wonder. Silicon Valley boasts the highest wages in the country. The average salary in the software industry is $80,000 a year, not counting stock options. Take those into account, and you’ve got workers under 30 worth millions.
“If they’ve made it,” said David Gee, program director for IBM’s Java Marketing, “they want to appreciate the finer things in life.”
Of course, appreciating creme brulee and knowing how to eat it do not always go hand in hand. That’s where Sue Fox and Lyndy Janes come in.
For about a year now, Fox (a refugee from the high-tech world of Apple) and Janes (a former professional model) have been teaching the etiquette of formal dining to folks who once thought sour-cream-and-onion potato chips made for a balanced meal.
Their classes attract people from other fields as well, everyone from authors to reflexologists. But high-tech has become an especially lucrative niche for them, as executives, sales managers, financial analysts and engineers strive to refine their manners.
Etiquette “is becoming more important today,” said Ann McKim, regional vice president of Bell Micro Products in San Jose. Knowing the rules, she added, “is the biggest confidence builder in the world.”
“I could see it benefiting not only our engineering staff but many of our other employees as well,” said Liz Quinn, a compensation analyst at Adobe Systems who wants to offer etiquette lessons to the entire staff. Especially when dealing with well-mannered foreign clients, she added, “we should all be well versed in etiquette to make sure we blend in.”
Quinn, 30, attended one of the seminars that Fox and Janes hold at least four times a month at formal restaurants in the valley. For a fee of $135 to $175, depending on the menu, participants receive a four-course meal, an earful of advice and a folder stuffed with illustrated handouts so they will never forget the difference between an oyster fork and a snail fork, or the proper way to dispose of a finger bowl doily.
It all sounds a bit froufrou, as even Janes admits.
But it seems to have hit a nerve.
Netscape Communications founder Bill Foss, 33, is surely no etiquette slouch; he once threw a luncheon party with four forks per place setting. Still, he invited Janes to his house to help him brush up on the niceties of dealing with foreign clients. And he understands why others are signing up as well.
Now that the high-tech industry has matured and gone global, Foss said, the spirit of grungy rebellion that built the Silicon Valley no longer seems so appropriate.
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At two-person start-ups, it may have been chic to work 18 hours a day in ripped-up jeans and to graze from vending machines. That doesn’t work so well at today’s high-polish international firms, which aim to set a classy tone by offering employees amenities such as a concierge to set up weekend plans, a masseuse to rub out workaday tensions, and a seminar to teach the fine art of conducting business on the golf course.
“A lot of the twenty- and thirtysomething engineers . . . are starting to be a little more self-conscious about not being able to present themselves correctly,” Foss said. “Three or four years ago, I saw them as more rebellious. They wanted the old guard to [adjust] to their ways, to go out and get a hamburger and wear shorts to work. . . . Now they’re trying to adapt themselves to the old guard’s ways.”
Fox and Janes are poised to exploit that shift in attitude. Their firm, The Workshoppe, has created an hourlong video to teach the masses how to unfold napkins, cradle wine glasses and spear cherry tomatoes without spewing seeds.
The duo have also started giving private, in-home lessons to show the valley’s instant millionaires how to use the china, crystal and silver they can now afford to buy.
Such finery is not for everyone; younger tech tycoons, many of them single, still do not do much formal entertaining. But Macy’s personal shopper Lynn Strinic said married couples in their 30s often come to her for help, sometimes picking out up to $7,000 worth of china at the Santa Clara store. “If they’re getting a new home, they want these things,” she said.
But, Janes added, “they don’t know what to do with them.”
For $75 an hour, she will tell them.
At a recent workshop at Maddalena’s restaurant in Palo Alto, Janes held forth for nearly three hours.
Don’t butter all your bread at once, she commanded. Don’t rest your used silverware on the tablecloth. Don’t drink when someone toasts to you. And don’t ever, ever lick your knife.
“Is there a discreet way to eat your sauce if you really like it?” Ed Ring, a high-tech publishing executive, asked as the appetizer was set down in front of him. “I like to mop it up with the bread.”
Janes looked pained. “You just leave it there,” she told him.
Ring looked more pained.
Janes relented: “You can try your darndest to mop it up with each bite of your tortellini.”
Ring did indeed try his darndest, industriously scraping his spoon around the plate to scoop up every speck of sauce, while eyeing his idle bread with longing.
When at long last he had cleaned the plate of pesto, Ring attacked the bread. And instantly drew another reproof.
“You’re not wringing out laundry,” Janes scolded, mocking the way he had twisted the roll to rip off a huge buttered chunk.
Sheepish, Ring tried a more dainty bite. “I had no idea,” he confessed.
Neither do many others in his high-tech industry. And, to be fair, some of them don’t care.
You can still find plenty of Silicon Valley successes who consider it a major concession if they leave their keyboards for a 10-minute takeout meal with colleagues.
“We’re sort of lucky if we eat on paper plates with plastic forks,” said Alan Harrington of the San Francisco multimedia firm PF Magic, which creates computer pets.
His colleague, chief engineer Ben Resner, interrupted with the suggestion that there are far more important things for computer geeks to learn than how to arrange their silverware to signal the waiter that they are done with a meal.
“They need to give programmers hygiene courses,” he said. “Etiquette is meaningless if a guy hasn’t bathed in a week and doesn’t know to change his underwear.”
Like Resner, many people steeped in Silicon stereotypes have a hard time imagining software techs caring that white wine goes in the narrow goblet, red wine in the wide one.
Palo Alto Councilwoman Liz Kniss, a marketing manager at Sun Microsystems, was skeptical at first. “They’re going to teach these guys how to conduct themselves at the table?” she chortled. But the more she thought about it, the more the concept made sense.
. The way she sees it, computer folks like to crack codes. So now that they’re eating out more, why wouldn’t the rules of etiquette intrigue them?
“This is one more piece of evidence,” Kniss said, “that the industry is growing up.”
