Some Local Executives Are Just Visiting

By now, David Marshall recognizes the faces on his Monday morning flight into Burbank Airport. They’re Internet and software types from the Bay Area, making their pilgrimages to the high-tech firms of Southern California every week, the way some people travel to work on the city bus.

And then he sees the same faces on Thursday or Friday evenings, heading home for a weekend and their social lives. To see their boyfriends or girlfriends. Their husbands, wives and children, with a week of stories to share.

They are a growing group, experts say, those who commute from the Silicon Valley and other areas to work in Ventura County’s 101 corridor, a burgeoning business community that doesn’t quite have a national reputation as a high-tech hub. And while a super-commute isn’t a rarity--salespeople and consultants make them all the time--the relative permanence of these situations in the high-tech field is something new, experts said.

To these commuters, Ventura County is mostly the stretch of road--the Ronald Reagan Freeway, California 23 or the Ventura Freeway--that leads to their east county offices.

Marshall, vice president of e-commerce at Homestore.com, commutes the hundreds of miles from Moraga to Thousand Oaks because his family is happily ensconced in the Bay Area, and he doesn’t want to uproot them.

Also, he said, if the job hadn’t worked out and he had moved here, he could have been stranded in this county, in an economic gray area in which there’s a notable growth of high-tech firms, but not quite enough to make finding a new job a certain bet.

“You would have to all of a sudden try to find something back in San Francisco,” Marshall said. Living in the Bay Area, “it would be easier to make the next step,” he said.

It’s tough, these coastal commuters say. But Internet types

are a different breed. They like to work. They most likely would be spending long days at the office no matter where they lived.

At first, Marshall wouldn’t even consider the Thousand Oaks job, but promises of career excitement and a nice compensation package helped sweeten the deal.

So, he rents an apartment in Thousand Oaks. He works long hours each day and then returns to his wife and two children at the end of the week--with a to-do list awaiting him. He has two cars, one to store at Burbank Airport, one in Oakland. The whole thing probably costs him $15,000 to $20,000 a year, he estimates. But, he figures, with what he makes at Homestore.com, he probably can retire early.

“This isn’t so far it’s unsustainable,” Marshall said. “It’s an hour plane ride. It’s not like you’re in traffic for hours.”

And that’s a blessing, these commuters say. They’d rather be on a plane--and then on a Ventura County freeway--than on the notoriously jammed Silicon Valley freeways at rush hour.

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“I really enjoy not having to deal with the day-to-day commute,” said Lucy Harendza, a marketing director at Nortel Networks in Simi Valley and a resident of Santa Clara. “It’s nothing here compared to Silicon Valley.”

But she could never move to the county permanently.

“Simi Valley is a bit rural for my liking,” Harendza said. “I can see cows on the hills. I’m from New York, and this feels out in the boonies.”

Most say they make the weekly commute to keep their families anchored at home, in the same schools, ballet and karate lessons they grew up in. The difference? Sometimes, they miss out on the recitals.

“You sacrifice a piece of the family,” said Dean Denhart, chief information officer at Homestore.com and Marshall’s fellow commuter. “You miss the concert during the week. You miss helping on homework. You miss out on the little interactions that happen when you’re sitting on the sofa together.”

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Leo Spiegel, president of Digital Island, commutes by car from San Diego. When one of his kids has an important event, he drives there and then drives back to Thousand Oaks right after to finish up a day of work.

“It’s been a challenge for me, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had to balance it,” he said. “You just remember what’s important. You’re there for the special stuff.”

The fact that high-tech employees would travel so far for a job is no surprise to experts. They’re focused on what they learn, with other factors less important. They’re willing to try new opportunities and strategies and less likely to be loyal to one company.

“Keeping their skills honed, that’s their security,” said Ron Hagler, director of the MBA program at Cal Lutheran University. “In the past, companies probably wouldn’t have allowed this. But they’ve had to loosen up to get the talent.”

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Further, the Internet world has turned into one with such turnover and ambition that many high-tech workers constantly have their eye on the next possibility.

“It’s really not a simple commute,” said Trevor Marshall, chairman of YARC Systems in Camarillo, where the former president made the Bay Area commute every week. “But in high-tech these days, people take jobs without consideration of lifetime employment. If it works out, maybe they’ll eventually move.”

Most commuters downplayed the weekly round-trip flight. With their insane Internet schedules, some say, they really don’t see their kids any less than they did when they were living in the same house all week. For many, it’s that simple.

“Why move [my family] around?” Spiegel asked. “Then they’d all complain that I was never home for dinner--which I wouldn’t be.”

* POSITION FILLED

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