Geekdom Is Awash in Perks

Three years ago, Brian Pink made $20,000 a year designing concert posters and business cards for a small graphics shop. Today, the self-taught programmer earns five times that as technology chief of an Internet start-up in Encinitas, Calif.

Forget picking Internet stocks. If you want to make money in the new economy, pick up the computer languages that make the World Wide Web go.

“Dot-coms” are dangling Fortune 500-level salaries and generous perks in a tug-of-war for technical talent. Brainy teenagers who know software codes are landing $40,000-a-year jobs straight from high school at start-ups desperate to get their Web sites running.

A full-time concierge handles dry-cleaning and other chores for time-pressed employees at a Santa Monica e-commerce company. A Malibu dot-com treated its entire staff to a vacation in Hawaii. Catered Friday afternoon parties and game rooms with Foosball tables are de rigueur at new-media companies, recruiters say.

Some Internet companies are raising the ante with signing bonuses and other goodies commonly used by large corporations. A Pasadena start-up recently lured database management expert Chris Kelly away from Bank of America by matching his six-figure salary and giving him an office in San Francisco so he wouldn’t have to move.

The rapid growth of new-media companies in Southern California has exacerbated an existing shortage of technical workers, headhunters say. And there is no sign that the recent slump in Internet stock prices is cooling the competition for talent. Recruiters in Los Angeles say salaries are up 25% since last spring and are expected to jump 20% more during the next 12 months. And programmers, like many dot-com employees, receive stock options that could make them rich should their companies take off.

Some venture capital firms that ultimately fund the payroll at dot-coms believe that salaries and perks will level off as investor interest in the Internet cools. They say dot-coms are using up cash received before investors retreated from Internet stocks in April, causing the tech-heavy Nasdaq to plummet 25% in a week.

“We may be at a peak,” said Jonathan Funk of Santa Monica-based Media Technology Ventures.

But other venture capital firms note that the Internet economy is expected to grow as technology develops and more people and companies use the new medium. New-media companies are in a race to get their businesses to market first, and to do so they need smart programmers.

What’s more, the scattered failure of dot-coms isn’t likely to ease the overall shortage of programmers. Many large tech companies are recruiting foreign workers, and the Commerce Department is planning an advertising campaign in the fall to promote technology careers with an eye toward reducing the shortage in coming years.

“You will always need good engineers,” said G. Bradford Jones of Los Angeles-based Redpoint Ventures.

Three Job Offers in Just Four Days

Veteran programmers typically juggle multiple offers. Kevin Dorris said he received three offers in four days during a brief job search last month. He accepted a $90,000 programming post with Web design firm Razorfish, which boasts an on-site basketball court.

“I’ve never seen the market this good,” said Dorris, 39.

Some start-ups are paying bounties to current employees who help them snag new talent. At ArsDigita in Pasadena, employees who attract 10 programmers to the company get a free Ferrari. The Cambridge, Mass.-based firm, which offers the same deal at its seven locations, pays starting programmers between $70,000 and $100,000 a year.

Programmers, long dissed as geeks and nerds, say they are finally getting some respect. On organization charts, technology chiefs are rising from department heads to corporate officers--from management information system directors to chief technology officers. CTOs at Internet companies earn as much as marketing and sales chiefs, recruiters say.

Geekdom is losing its stigma on college campuses. Graduates with plenty of options are grabbing programming jobs. At USC, English majors are teaching themselves computer languages, said career planning executive director Eileen B. Kohan.

For C.J. Brown, a senior chemistry major at Caltech, the choice between graduate school and a dot-com is a no-brainer: “I can make 15K as a lab rat or 60K plus stock.”

Employers grumble that all this pampering has gone to some programmers’ heads. In a tight market, programmers have less incentive to resolve disagreements or push to get work done, they say.

“A programmer can throw a handkerchief in the air and have three job offers,” said William J. Curtis, CEO of SmallOffice.com, which has lost several programmers. “They come in like gods.”

Some technical workers clearly feel empowered. David D. Zito, a 24-year-old Caltech grad and veteran of two dot-coms, leveraged his experience into a vice presidency with a six-figure income and generous options at PayMyBills.com. What’s more, Zito said, he accumulates options whenever he beats the CEO at one-on-one basketball and manages to outrun President Jaynie M. Studenmund, a 44-year-old former marathoner.

Said Zito: “I learned how the game is played.”

Studenmund, a former banking executive who briefly held a marketing post at the Los Angeles Times, said the “sports challenges” are less about wealth than spending “quality, nonwork time” with a valued employee. Attracting talent takes flexibility, she noted.

PayMyBills also is footing the bill for Chris Kelly to open a San Francisco office and fly to Pasadena three days a week.

“They were very sensitive to the fact that I had a family,” said Kelly, a 48-year-old vice president, who didn’t want to yank his three young children from school and friends.

Local dot-coms have ramped up benefits in the last six to eight months, headhunters say, bringing the Silicon Valley’s entitlement culture to Southern California. Los Angeles-area start-ups increasingly offer full health and dental benefits, subsidized athletic club memberships and pretax investment plans, they say, along with the obligatory free soft drinks and snacks.

Stock Options Don’t Cut It

Such perks have become necessary to retain skilled programmers, who often work six days a week, recruiters say. Stock options are no longer enough, as an uncertain stock market has diminished prospects for Internet initial public offerings. And programmers have many alternatives; about 200,000 new technical workers are needed annually, according to a recent Commerce Department report.

What’s more, the big tech companies also have enhanced their employee benefits. America Online has a concierge that makes restaurant reservations and handles car repairs for employees. Reston, Va.-based Career Builder converted the West Virginia barn of a software expert into a state-of-the-art telecommunications center so he wouldn’t have to relocate.

Silicon Valley, where dot-coms give away BMWs to attract bright Stanford University grads, still sets the standard for perks. But start-ups in Los Angeles are holding their own.

Santa Monica-based EHobbies recently hired a concierge to handle travel arrangements and other tasks for employees. Besides throwing a weekly party, SmallOffice.com in October treated its 40 employees to a vacation in Maui as a reward for putting in long hours to launch the company.

At ZKey.com in downtown Los Angeles, programmers share offices where signs posted on doors warn other employees not to disturb them. Anyone working after 8 p.m. gets dinner free. Their dry-cleaning is picked up and dropped off daily.

When programmers need a break, they can relax in a game room equipped with Nerf guns, Foosball, table tennis and a Sony PlayStation. Or they can rest on cots in a “tranquillity room” gently lit by a lava lamp. Before that, programmers had been napping at their desks.

After one new programmer stretched his first day into 32 hours--beginning at 11:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and ending at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday--ZKey made a rule against staying overnight. And to prevent burnout, the company requires programmers who work into the night to not return to work for at least 12 hours.

“It is the first place where I’ve ever been told to go home,” said Brian Ragazzi, 28, the programmer who pulled the all-day-and-nighter.

Dot-coms use every recruiting tool to find programmers who know computer languages critical to the Web. Ontario-based Logicom is using three message boards and four recruitment agencies. Pasadena-based Idealab is planning a boot camp next fall to teach computer languages to Caltech seniors it hopes to hire.

BizRate.com in Marina del Rey acquired a consulting firm headed by former aerospace engineers to get technical expertise. And dot-coms have stepped up their campus recruiting. Caltech, USC and UCLA say dot-coms are offering competitive salaries and options, and in some cases, signing bonuses. Engineering students “are in the catbird’s seat,” said Caltech career counselor Jo-Ann Ruffolo.

Marc Gustafson, a senior at Caltech, received offers of $60,000-plus from Oracle, Scient and a Pasadena-based dot-com. Oracle sweetened the pot with a signing bonus and Scient treated Gustafson and about three dozen other prospective recruits to a weekend of revelry in New York that included lodging at the plush Crown Plaza hotel, he said.

Gustafson finally chose Scient for a benefit the other firms couldn’t match. It has an Austin office, which gives the young Texan a chance to work closer to home.

Programmers increasingly ask questions about an Internet company’s management and financial backing, recruiters say. But, they say, it takes more than one bad experience to sour tech workers on dot-coms, which offer the possibility of a big payoff.

The recent demise of Digital Entertainment Network, which had hoped to devise products for both Hollywood and the Internet, has put a number of programmers out of work. But probably not for long.

“If they strike out once, that’s OK,” said Helen MacKinnon, head of the Technical Connections recruiting firm in Los Angeles. “They want to try again.”

Pink, a former programmer at DEN, took a circuitous route to the executive suite. After college, he struggled as a painter before taking up graphic design. He soon gravitated to Web design. Frustrated when programmers couldn’t execute his ideas, he taught himself computer languages. Soon, he became a programmer himself.

As a CTO, he makes enough money to load up on digital cameras and other gizmos. And, as a benefit of Encinitas’ seaside location, the 26-year-old surfs on his lunch hour.

Caltech Dropout Lands Plum Post

The tight job market is creating other self-made successes. Less than three years ago, Caltech dropout Jody Biggs managed a Radio Shack in his hometown of Sebastopol, Calif. Now, the 22-year-old self-taught programmer earns more than five times his Radio Shack salary as director of technology at PayMyBills.

A headhunter at Remington International in West Los Angeles said he places two or three teenagers in dot-com jobs every week who have taught themselves basic programming. Office manager Michael Burns said he turned away a 16-year-old looking for work. “We don’t handle them under 17,” he said.

After graduating from Colton’s Buena Vista High School in January, David Farrell landed a job at SmallOffice.com. The 18-year-old picked up the programming language Cold Fusion while working for a Web design firm after school.

Farrell says he plans to attend college--later on. But first, he’d like to learn a new computer language, Java. And after that, he said, “maybe I’ll become a millionaire.”