There are fewer low-level positions advertised, because of a trend toward robotization, a trend toward moving product assembly to Taiwan, Korea, the Sacramento Valley, and remote areas of the United States, where the labor costs are cheaper. But good programmers are always in short supply here because of the tremendous amount of programming needs. Service workers in the non-high tech sector are in high demand, too, because so many workers here have decided that they can't make money in these areas. A given weekday, we'll run hundreds of ads for anyone from maitre d's to dishwashers.
People here change jobs like you change shoes. You just go to the same industrial park that you went into yesterday and go into a new driveway and park in a new spot.
"For $100,000? Nine hundred square feet and a bath." -- Betty C. Van Valer
Betty Van Valer is a real estate broker in San Jose.
For $100,000 you can get 900 square feet and one bathroom, maybe a bath and a half. We are talking condo, not townhouse. A townhouse would normally have a garage and some small sort of yard. You would probably pop up a little ways to get that.
For a house, say a quarter of an acre within a half-hour commute to your job, you'd probably be looking at $275,000 up to $325,000. But we're talking about something nice.
"The bright young engineers didn't tell us that they buried the smokestacks." -- Ted Smith
Ted Smith, a San Jose lawyer, is chairman of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an organization founded three years ago to oppose industrial pollution.
People have started calling Silicon Valley, Paradise Lost. I talk to people who lived in residential areas literally directly across the street from some of these electronics plants. They remember being told, "This is a clean industry" when they expressed concern about seeing a big industrial plant go up across from their homes 20 years ago. But when the bright young engineers were trading on their clean image, they weren't telling us that they buried the smokestacks.
We've compiled a list of 100 or so chemicals that have been spilled into the groundwater: hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, lots of Freon, xylene, toluene, trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, methylene chloride, lots and lots of different solvents, different acids; also lots of poison gases like arsine, phosphine, and diborane. In south San Jose, an instrument plant had a storage tank that by convervative estimates leaked 60,000 gallons of waste solvent before it was detected. It got into the major water system that served the neighborhood. An epidemiological study just released showed that the rate of birth defects there was three times the expected rate, and the miscarriage rate was about two-and-a-half times normal.
"Now to this business of our sexual life." -- Jean Hollands
Jean Hollands is a therapist who practices in Mountain View. She has just changed the name of her business from The Good Life Clinic Inc. to Growth & Leadership Consultants Inc.
The typical couple that comes in for therapy includes a man who is very detached emotionally. He's never learned how to show his feelings. Ever since he was a little boy, he's been taught to keep things in. He is terrified of interpresonal relationships, afraid that you'll make him cry, or that you will confront him and he may have to confront you back.
The wife brings him in because the marriage is on the rocks, or it isn't now but it will be soon. Sometimes, he's all business. This one man even said, "Now to this business of our sexual life." He had been written up in Esquire as one of the big shots in the Valley.
Or take the man, a prominent engineer for many years, whose wife was leaving him.He felt just despondent. I said, "You've got to tell somebody. You've got to say the words, my wife is leaving me." He said, "Why?" It was Christmas, he was alone, and he didn't even know anyone to tell that his wife wasn't coming to the Christmas party. So I said, "Is there anybody you have ever known who you felt you could share anything with?" And he sat there a long time, and finally said, "Yeah, when my kid was on drugs, at a Christmas office party a man came up to me from another unit that I used to know, put his hands on the back of my neck, and said, 'I heard about your daughter, I'm really sorry."
Then his face lit up, and he said, "I'll tell him." And he went looking for that guy -- but he had died.
That's not the end of the story. About two-and-a-half years later he calls me, frantic, he's got to come in. He looks like a new guy, wearing a gold chain, blowdried hair, smiling. He had gotten the divorce, and he said, "I've met this wonderful woman." Now this man was about 55; he had met this 26-year-old pregnant woman at a restaurant. She doesn't have a husband. She needs someone desperately.
Eventually, she left him. Now he's back home, playing with his computer.
"A good contract is not sealed with a drink anymore, but with a line of coke." -- Joseph McNamara
A former New York City detective, Joseph McNamara holds a PhD from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is the author of The First Directive, a mystery thriller set in Silicon Valley, which was published last October by Crown Publishing Co. He has been the chief of the 1,300-employee police department in San Jose for eight-and-a-half years.
Cocains has become inherent in the electronics industry. We got into it through a sting operation in a bar and grill a half mile from police headquarters. Normally, we buy stolen VCRs, TV sets, stereos, jewelry, and firearms. This time, we bought $250,000 worth of stolen electronic components; the thief didn't even know what he had with him. But we traced the stolen goods back to different corporations, and we found that management people and security people were involved, and that the currency was cocaine. All of the thieves were heavy coke users.
People would steal either to barter cocaine for goods that they stole from the company directly, or to take the money that they would receive from the stolen goods and buy cocaine. And we saw lack of management awareness, or management indifference, or worse, management complicity. We had one company where there were 400 employees, and 95% of them were doing drugs. At another company, when we arrested the boss, he was sitting at his desk with a straw and a line of coke -- in a glass office with 20 employees around. We had another case where a top executive passed around a sugar jar full of cocaine at an office celebration. A good contract is not sealed with a drink anymore, but with a line of coke.
