Sleepless in Silicon Valley

Pay to play in ‘the A league’
“If you want to play in the A league, you have to take on some additional challenges,” Spitz said. “It might not mean that you have to work around the clock for your entire career — at some point, you can step off the treadmill. But if you want to be in the business, then you have to commit to this schedule for some period of time.”

At what cost, however?

Some worry that the extra hours and unrelenting pace could have dire consequences — namely, widespread fatigue and brain drain in the technology and financial services industries, the most aggressive exporters of white-collar jobs. Steep turnover among sleep-deprived managers could eventually lead senior executives to re-evaluate the benefits of offshoring, said Peter Morici, an international business professor at Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland.

“You simply can’t keep working a full day, put the kids to bed, take a call from Malaysia, then go back fresh the next morning — it’s one thing to do it for a couple weeks, but it’s another to put up with this pain in the neck permanently,” Morici said. “When executives talk about the efficiencies of offshoring, they’re often not factoring in the long-term human toll on management.”

Challenges in staffing
Staffing challenges may already be taking that toll. According to a study released in April by Deloitte Consulting LLP, 62 percent of senior executives interviewed at 25 large corporations said offshoring required more management effort than they had originally thought. More than half said they couldn’t free up enough managers to supervise projects.

Worker advocates compare the trend to the automobile industry phenomenon of “speedup” in the 1920s, when Henry Ford increased assembly line speed without paying workers more. Turnover mushroomed to 400 percent per year in some Detroit-area plants, and the frenzied pace helped the 1930s union movement.

Marcus Courtney, president and organizer of WashTech, the Seattle-based branch of the Communication Workers of America, said few employers pay overtime for midnight meetings or red-eyes to Shanghai. And while many techies are proud workaholics, dawn teleconferences and 9 p.m. hand-off meetings have stretched shifts to absurd lengths.

“In today’s global economy, employees are seeing longer working hours, greater job insecurity due to job exporting, and fewer rewards and opportunity,” Courtney said. “I’m worried that the stress levels of employees continues to rise and we are seeing a further eroding of the 50-hour work week.”

Burnout prevention
Hours are particularly long at startups and when companies launch overseas operations. But offshoring needn’t result in burnout, seasoned executives say.

Peter Hazlehurst, senior vice president of engineering at financial services software company Yodlee Inc., supervises 170 engineers, including 30 in Redwood City and 140 in Bangalore, India.

Managers recently began alternating weekly meetings between 8 a.m. Wednesdays and 9 p.m. Thursdays, so neither Americans nor Indians get the late shift every time.

“People are more receptive when they realize that this relatively challenging burden of working between time zones is a shared burden,” Hazlehurst said.

It’s unclear whether Silicon Valley’s new work schedule will become the national norm as jobs migrate abroad — or whether foreigners will continue to staff the most brutal shifts.

Forecast: 830,000 jobs offshore by year's end
Roughly 830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs — ranging from telemarketers and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers — will move abroad by the end of 2005, and 3.4 million more jobs will leave over the next decade, forecasts Forrester Research Inc.

Bombay-based consulting powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services employs 42,000 employees worldwide, including 14,000 people in India who handle U.S. projects. Their shifts are from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., or from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. local time, not including frequent early or late meetings with overseas clients, said Arup Gupta, president of Tata Consultancy Services America.

“We can be the ones who put in the overlap time,” Gupta said. “These types of schedules are baked into India’s DNA. We have to earn our money somehow.”

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