Palo Alto Joe

Silicon Valley Job Types

In his spare time, Palo Alto Joe is a bit of a classifying occupational anthropolgist. Although my formal study will be published in a highly reputable scientific journal, I offer you, the reader, a sneak preview of this great taxonomy of Silicon Valley Careers. In short there are only four basic phylae of power- jobs in Silicon Valley: Coders, Splicers, Geeks and Weenies.

The most populous of course are the coders. The coder phylum includes such classes as hackers, programmers and computer geeks. The members of these classes may refer to themselves by lofty names like Software Engineer, or if they are truly full of themselves and unwillling to do much in the way of actual coding, they will refer to themselves as Computer Scientists. Coders are the most prominent of the four power-job phylae because they try the hardest to blend into normal society. Like an immigrant culture hoping to assimilate, Coders want nothing more than to fit in, often with disastrous results.

Splicers are the smallest but potentially most important of the four job types. A Splicer cuts genetic information and puts it back together, creating designer tomatos one week and genetic therapies for breast enhancement the next, but always creating fat profit margins in the process. In the future the Splicers will rule the world and be able to create Coders, Geeks and Weenies at will from a few spoonfuls of Gator Aid and cough syrup. The greatest hope the Splicers offer humanity in the short term, however, is that they will find a cure for the Geeks.

Although amateur occupational taxonomists often misidentify Coders and Splicers as members of the phylum Geekus, Palo Alto Joe knows that you can't spell Geek without EE. (The issue has become more confused in recent years as the University of California at Berkeley has begun spelling it gEECS) However, it is a central tenent of my taxonomy that only the chip designers, the wire heads and the silicon electricians qualify as true Geeks. The identifying characteristics include: shoulders made of tofu and a complete awkwardness in the presence of non-Geek humans. In defense of Geeks it must be said that no Coder or Splicer and certainly no Weenie could combine six million anythings together and make it work without crashing, mutating or inciting a Christmas-shopping stampede.

Finally the fourth phylum of power-jobs is the Marketing Weenies. These are your sales and marketing types who usually stick to yuppie-sheep places like Q's Blue Fanny but are too often spoiling an otherwise enjoyable evening at the Rose and Crown with their constant banter about money, cars and balsamic vinegar. Generally the Geeks, Coders and Splicers like to write off the Weenies as useless, driveling, second-handers who reap fat change from the fruits of their labors. Of course the Weenies are really the ones who convince an ignorant public that they want all of the crap that the other three are turning out. Marketing heroes are the big Weenies at Microsoft who are the greatest purveyors of low quality crap the world has ever seen.

In the near term, it seems that Silicon Valley is stuck with all four of these groups whether we like it or not. We can only be thankful that we haven't yet seen large numbers of the fifth power job type: the Pushers. No, not the drug pushers, I think we have those. These are the money pushers who work in New York and London who have the highly skilled job of pushing money from one pile to another and magically making more money in the process.

Next week, Palo Alto Joe will classify for you, the reader, the four most obnoxious types of sports fans: Factoids, (Bandwagon) Jumpers, Face Painters and the guy who watched Monday Night Packers across from me a couple months ago at Q's Blue Fanny.