Silicon Valley's Best and Worst Jobs for New Moms (and Dads) - The Atlantic The Atlantic Silicon Valley's Best and Worst Jobs for New Moms (and Dads) A look at major differences in the tech industry’s approach to parental leave Print Text Size The tech industry has a reputation for being both a wonderland of employee benefits and a place that is unfriendly to families, particularly mothers. Along with the weekly massages, travel stipends, unlimited organic snacks, and casino-themed happy hours are stories of women who are stigmatized and punished for having children, overworked employees who feel they will never be able to balance family and a career, and entrepreneurs who are told by their advisors not to hire women of childbearing age. The dichotomy is stark and puzzling. The U.S. is one of only four countries in the world— along with Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Papua New Guinea —that does not guarantee the right to paid maternity leave. While a few states offer taxpayer-funded family and medical leave , and while President Obama is pushing for a national paid parental-leave policy , the responsibility of creating these policies remains at the discretion of each employer.

Supportive parental-leave policies are a critical part of keeping women in the workforce and in leadership positions. Considering that women today hold less than 20 percent of leadership positions in corporate America, according to a 2015 report by Colorado Women’s College, and just 5 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women—all while job participation by women during peak earning years is sharply dropping —the need for widespread change is dire. Tech companies serve as a role model for the rest of the country when it comes to corporate culture. Thus the dichotomy that exists in how the tech industry has ramifications that extend far beyond Silicon Valley. “We find ourselves at a crossroads, where our workforce demographics, family demographics, and population dynamics are changing,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families . “Big tech companies are on the leading edge of supporting families and some tech leaders are speaking out, but by and large, companies don’t necessarily see their own interest or the public interest in creating these policies.” The U.S. is one of only four countries in the world that does not guarantee the right to paid maternity leave.

To better understand the disparities that exist in the tech industry when it comes to supporting employees with families, I examined parental-leave policies at 15 different tech companies across sizes, verticals, and locations. Leading tech companies like Facebook , Apple , Google , and Yahoo offer some of the most generous parental leave policies in the U.S. Among this group, Facebook is the only company to offer equal time off for all parents, whether they are the birth mother, father, or adopted parents. All new parents at Facebook receive four months of paid leave, as well as $4,000 in “baby cash.” In the past year, Facebook introduced designated breast-feeding rooms at its Menlo Park location. In addition, it offers financial and logistical assistance with adoption and fertility services, including the controversial coverage of egg-freezing costs , which Apple also offers. Apple’s paid family-leave policy gives expectant mothers up to four weeks before a delivery and 14 weeks after. Expectant fathers and other non-birth parents can take six-week paid parental leaves. At Google, biological mothers are given 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and 22 if there are complications.

New parents, regardless of gender, can receive up to 12 weeks of paid baby bonding time, including adoptive or surrogate caregivers. Non-primary caregivers are eligible for 7 weeks paid leave. “We formerly had a maternity-leave policy of 12 weeks of fully paid and vested leave, but science better informed our decision-making in 2007,” said Google spokesperson Roya Soleimani. “Twelve-week-olds are at a very different place developmentally than are 18-week olds, so we changed our maternity leave to 18 weeks. It just felt like the right thing to do. After our policy change, we also found that returning moms left at half the rate they were leaving at previously.” Google also offers a number of caregiving benefits, including consultations for parents searching for childcare, discounts for nanny-placement agencies, and “mother’s rooms” equipped with hospital-grade sterilization tools in all Google buildings, and $500 towards baby supplies. These benefits not only aim to make life easier for working parents, but also to promote a family-friendly atmosphere. According to Shabo, culture can play just as significant a role as the actual policy in supporting new parents, and culture trickles down from the top.

“We’ve seen that upper income, well-educated workers don’t take leave because they think they will be viewed negatively, won’t be taken as seriously, their commitment will be questioned, and they will lose out on opportunities for advancement,” she said. “A lot of research shows that this is true, so leaders have to create a culture where the policies aren’t just something that is on paper, but are encouraged. Culture relies heavily on initial groundbreaking people who take leave and come back.” More on Paid Parental Leave A Map of Maternity-Leave Policies Around the World YouTube CEO Susan Wojicki was Google’s first-ever employee to go on maternity leave when the company was new. Last year, she went on maternity leave for the fifth time. In a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal , Wojicki wrote that nearly 5,000 women at Google have gone on maternity leave and that paid maternity leave is “good for business.” Another high-profile female leader to take maternity leave is Marissa Mayer, who was pregnant with her first child when she became the CEO of Yahoo. Mayer actually took some flak for not taking enough maternity leave , as well as for her decision to end Yahoo’s telecommuting policy and install a nursery next to her office.

However, she also made significant upgrades to Yahoo’s parental-leave program. Before Mayer, Yahoo’s policy included disability and maternity benefits that were in line with California’s regulations (six weeks), but provided no paternity leave. In April 2013, Yahoo extended its parental-leave policy to offer 16 weeks of paid maternity leave and 8 weeks of paid time off to fathers and parents of foster, adopted, or surrogate children. Yahoo’s Director of Global Benefits Joe Gracey said this time can be taken anytime within one year of the birth, adoption, or foster-care placement. In addition, Yahoo offers $500 for baby-related expenses, and $5,000 towards adoption. In its larger locations, the company holds periodic “new child showers” with food, games, and decorations for people who have had a child, are expecting, or are thinking of having one. At these events, Yahoo’s benefits teams provides more information about all the various programs and policies. Twitter’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, Janet Van Huysse, said Twitter provides 20 weeks of paid maternity leave for birth mothers and 10 paid weeks for paternity leave or adoptive parents.

It also holds “New Moms and Moms-to-Be” roundtables every quarter where women who are leaving for or returning from parental leave can get together to share questions, concerns, and best practices. This initiative has led to others, including a “Mommy Mentor” program, Working Moms monthly lunches, and the new “Dads On Leave” roundtables. Instagram and Reddit both offer 17 weeks of paid leave for new moms and dads, making them among the most generous equal-leave policies in the industry. Last fall, Change.org announced that it would offer 18 weeks of fully-paid parental leave to every employee who becomes a parent, biological or otherwise. “Equal leave is particularly important for reducing stereotypes that exist in the workplace because non-equal policies encourage hidden biases that women will be away from work longer, and thus get fewer raises and promotions,” said the Change.org COO Jennifer Dulski, who spearheaded the effort behind the expanded program.

“Our view is if you provide equal leave to all parents, you reduce that bias.” In addition to announcing its own policy, Change.org also initiated a campaign on its petition platform and across social media where employees could put pressure on their employers to do “the right thing.” When employers realize that parental leave is essential to recruiting top talent, Dulski expects this will cause a “sea change” among the tech companies who still lag behind. And there are many, many companies that lag behind. A majority of tech companies are nowhere near as generous as Change.org, Instagram, Reddit, and its peers, offering the bare minimum or a modicum above it. In 2014, the ad startup PaperG conducted a survey of 97 tech companies ranging from seed stage to post-IPO about their policies. One-quarter of the companies surveyed offer less than a month of paid maternity leave and 43 percent offer less than a month of paid paternity leave. While 100 percent of later stage companies (Series D, post-IPO) offer paid maternity and paternity leave, no seed-stage startups offer family leave policies at all. (By the Series A funding round, this number bumps up to 50 percent.) Stage of Funding vs.

Paid Maternity and Paternity Leave Offering Red bars show the percent of companies that offer paid maternity leave, while blue bars show the percent of companies that offer paid paternity leave. ( PaperG ) This is understandable. Large, well-funded companies have more resources to allocate to parental leave and are more able than a small team to compensate for an employee who is out. Startups at the seed stage generally don’t have human resources infrastructure in place, or even employees for whom paid parental leave is an issue. (This hints at another cultural issue in Silicon Valley—bias against hiring older workers and parents.) Many of the companies interviewed for this article said they started thinking about paid family leave once they had employees that needed it. “A lot of companies are started by young founders who learn so much on the job,” said Andy Sparks, the COO and cofounder of Mattermark . “They don’t really know what they are doing and blinders are up to anything that is not right in front of them.

At Mattermark, we realized we needed to be conscious of family leave if we wanted to respect people’s lives outside of work, even if no one had kids yet.” Mattermark offers up to 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, which is on par with what Pinterest and Kickstarter offer (that’s also what mothers at The Atlantic get, for what it’s worth), as well as 12 weeks of paid paternity leave, which is more generous than Apple or Yahoo. Salesforce , on the other hand, offers just four weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave. These findings corroborate those of PaperG, which found that while there is a relationship between the size or funding stage of a company and whether or not they have a parental-leave policy, there is no relationship between the size or funding stage and the amount of paid maternity or paternity leave they offer. The stronger correlations actually relate to female representation in a company. The fact that companies with more female employees and leaders are more likely to offer strong parental-leave policies is confirmed by both data and anecdotal evidence, from companies including Rent The Runway, Mattermark, Wildflower Health , and Lyft .

These companies are more likely to cultivate an atmosphere that supports work-life balance and does not stigmatize parenthood, according to the PaperG study. "Rent the Runway is a really family- and mother-friendly company,” said Rent the Runway’s UX Lead Jess Brown. “The maternity policies are well laid out, senior leadership has kids, people have been pregnant, taken maternity leave, come back, and hasn’t impacted their career here at all. It is really empowering and positive to see. I definitely think female founders are a factor in the flexibility because if there are no women around to speak up, it can be intimidating.” Across Silicon Valley, women are often not around to speak up, given that they represent a severe minority in the tech workforce and leadership. However, across Silicon Valley, women are often not around to speak up, given that they represent a severe minority in the tech workforce and leadership. Men outnumber women 7 to 3 in the tech industry. Just 13 percent of venture-backed companies have at least one female co-founder and tech companies employ an average of 12 percent women engineers.

These appalling numbers are often delivered with a cacophony of claims about “pipeline problems” that do little more than absolve the tech industry of its culpability, especially considering sexism is a major contributor to pipeline problems. Large, well-funded companies, like those examined above, have entire departments dedicated to “culture” and human resources teams that focus on supporting women and families, but in the wild west of male-dominated startups, gender prejudice still runs rampant. “When I was starting out, I went to older men COOs for advice and a couple of them told me to be wary of hiring too many women, because if you have a bunch of women on your team, they all get pregnant and leave,” said Sparks, the Mattermark executive. “That happened a couple times, and it just made my skin crawl. If other men get this advice from older men, then it will only be perpetuated and perpetuated.” Stigmas like these contribute to the motherhood penalty which causes women’s wages to go down when they become parents (while men’s wages actually go up) and to be viewed as less competent, competitive, and worthy of promotion. They also make it far more difficult for women who have children to feel they can balance their job and their career.

Textio CEO and cofounder Kieran Snyder spent a month collecting stories from 716 women who left the tech industry and found that the overwhelming reason was “culture.” In an article in Fortune , she wrote that more than two-thirds of the women in her survey said motherhood was a factor in their decision to leave tech, due to unreasonable expectations from managers, an absence of support from the company for things like breastfeeding or childcare, and feeling overtly or implicitly discriminated against by leaders and coworkers. The progressive and inspiring policies of many of tech’s most prominent companies have not yet trickled down to the rest of the industry, either in practice or in priorities. While the specifics of the actual policies are important, they are just one part—albeit one critical part—of cultivating a culture that is welcoming to women. A 22-week policy or “unlimited” time-off means nothing if women are viewed as less capable, regularly experience harassment, or fear that having children will completely derail their career. Startups have been willing enough to emulate Google in offering free lunch for employees and other perks in an effort to recruit and retain the best staffers. Let’s hope that the same follow-the-leader routine soon takes place for supporting women and families.

Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program - The New York Times The New York Times Business Day |Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program Search Continue reading the main story Photo A Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Google says it scrutinizes each government request and notifies users if it is allowed. Credit Connie Zhou/Google, via Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — When government officials came to Silicon Valley to demand easier ways for the world’s largest Internet companies to turn over user data as part of a secret surveillance program, the companies bristled. In the end, though, many cooperated at least a bit. Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so. The negotiations shed a light on how Internet companies, increasingly at the center of people’s personal lives, interact with the spy agencies that look to their vast trove of information — e-mails, videos, online chats, photos and search queries — for intelligence.

They illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions. The companies that negotiated with the government include Google , which owns YouTube; Microsoft , which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo ; Facebook ; AOL ; Apple ; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence. Continue reading the main story In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The negotiations have continued in recent months, as Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives including those at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel .

Though the official purpose of those meetings was to discuss the future of the Internet, the conversations also touched on how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts, said a person who attended. While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so. Details on the discussions help explain the disparity between initial descriptions of the government program and the companies’ responses. Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers. The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers. “The U.S.

government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.” Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction. But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.

Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company. Advertisement Continue reading the main story FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before. In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop. In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.

Twitter spokesmen did not respond to questions about the government requests, but said in general of the company’s philosophy toward information requests: Users “have a right to fight invalid government requests, and we stand with them in that fight.” Twitter, Google and other companies have typically fought aggressively against requests they believe reach too far. Google , Microsoft and Twitter publish transparency reports detailing government requests for information, but these reports do not include FISA requests because they are not allowed to acknowledge them. Yet since tech companies’ cooperation with the government was revealed Thursday, tech executives have been performing a familiar dance, expressing outrage at the extent of the government’s power to access personal data and calling for more transparency, while at the same time heaping praise upon the president as he visited Silicon Valley. Even as the White House scrambled to defend its online surveillance, President Obama was mingling with donors at the Silicon Valley home of Mike McCue, Flipboard’s chief, eating dinner at the opulent home of Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, and cracking jokes about Mr. Khosla’s big, shaggy dogs. On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, posted on Facebook a call for more government transparency.

“It’s the only way to protect everyone’s civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term,” he wrote. Reporting was contributed by Nick Bilton, Vindu Goel, Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta in San Francisco; Edward Wyatt in Washington; Brian X. Chen and Leslie Kaufman in New York; and Nick Wingfield in Seattle. A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2013, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tech Companies, Bristling, Concede to Federal Surveillance Program. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Silicon Valley talent wars: Engineers, come get your $250K salary - CNET CNET Silicon Valley talent wars: Engineers, come get your $250K salary Silicon Valley talent wars: Engineers, come get your $250K salary Weeby thinks the way to hire superstar engineers in hypercompetitive Silicon Valley is to pay them like superstars, to the tune of $1 million over four years, and be totally transparent about it.

Up Next Governments suck at social media, but you deserve some blame In Silicon Valley, even the smallest team of talented engineers can hit the jackpot. Take Instagram, which entered into tech folklore when its 13 employees -- only half of whom were developers -- created a simple photo-sharing app that wound up getting bought by Facebook for a $1 billion in 2012. WhatsApp took that dynamic even further. With just 32 engineers , the company built a messaging tool that Facebook -- once again digging into its considerable coffers -- bought for $19 billion in February. That's why the best software engineers are difficult to find these days. In some ways, the most bitter competition between tech rivals isn't for market share; it's to hire these skilled workers, who can easily command multiple $100,000-plus job offers replete with attractive perks and equity packages. In an attempt to control the hiring market, companies like Apple, Google, and Adobe were found to have illegally conspired on a wage-fixing scheme , leading to a nine-figure settlement in April.

Weeby CEO and co-founder Michael CarterPhoto by Weeby.co So it is that one Silicon Valley startup is trying out its own version of shock and awe to grab the attention of the best of the best engineers. Weeby.co , led by a CEO whose technical work is used on more than 2 billion devices worldwide and who has advised more than 100 companies on fundraising, is building an innovative development platform for social games and is offering to pay its engineers an average salary well above market rate: $250,000 a year, or a million dollars over four years, plus equity. There's obviously some gimmickry here. Like many startup CEOs, Weeby.com's Michael Carter has struggled to distinguish his company in the hiring wars. The 22-person company, which plans to launch its platform this year, already has what Carter considers a superstar team. But he wants to grow, albeit only with the right new people. The 29-year-old, 6-foot-2 Carter argues that while individual engineers are unlikely to profoundly impact public tech companies, they can make a huge difference at small startups like his.

"If you look at a really talented engineer," said Carter, "they'll help Facebook, Apple, or Google, but they won't fundamentally change anything. Whereas that same engineer at a small company could be the difference between failure and a billion dollars." Many in the tech world believe that giving quality engineers substantial amounts of equity, which can turn into valuable nest eggs for very early employees at successful companies, is the way to build for the long haul. Those people think paying market rate salaries, which average $111,000 in the Valley, according to Glassdoor , a company that aggregates salary data, is the best approach. But Carter counters that even at $111,000 a year, people will worry about mortgages in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, other debt, or the cost of raising kids. By paying market rate, he feels, startups force would-be hires to hunt for more lucrative employment, or drive them straight into the arms of the higher-paying Googles and Facebooks of the Valley. To Carter, talented engineers should be paid as if they are the foundation for potential 10-figure companies.

That means salaries far higher than average, combined with total transparency about compensation, and performance. That's how you build a great team, he believes. That's why Weeby is launching its all-new compensation program this week, a bold gambit to shake up what Carter believes is Silicon Valley's "backwards" pay structure. Employers feel betrayed if engineers are worried about salary, "Or they have the wrong response, like, 'if you really believe in our mission, you'll stay,'" Carter said. "Which totally ignores peoples' financial constraints. We thought that was ridiculous. There's so much effort lost in the world to people playing this ridiculous game. People who don't play the game, those are the people we should be celebrating. But it's [usually] the opposite." 2 billion people Few outside the Valley have heard of Carter, but he's a big name in entrepreneurial circles, especially those focused on building apps and tools for real-time communications. In 2008, he created the WebSocket protocol for HTML5 , the latest major revision of the World Wide Web's core language.

Adopted in devices used by more than 2 billion people -- and nearly every Fortune 500 company -- WebSocket made it easy to build new classes of real-time applications like games, stock tickers, chat rooms, and others, that previously would have required up to 20 times the engineering resources. Carter is also a three-time founder and adviser to more than 100 startups, largely due to his relationship with StartX , a Stanford University-based accelerator. "He has gone out of his way to help other teams," said Cameron Teitelman, StartX's founder and CEO. "He holds this fundraising workshop...that we recommend every founder goes to and always has very high attendance. Basically, people get a ton of value from his insights on raising money, so they come back and recommend it to others." Now, though, Carter is trying to make Weeby's platform the linchpin of what the market research company Newzoo estimated in 2011 is the $18.2 billion global casual games industry.

Weeby's platform is designed around a common set of tools for building game levels, user interfaces, high score systems, and other elements that make up what are called the "game loop." Developers can create new games and roll them into Weeby's game loop, enabling very small teams to build the kinds of hit iOS or Android games in weeks that today require dozens of people up to 18 months. The financial promise of this platform was considered lucrative enough to merit a $12 million A round of funding in 2012 led by Highland Capital Partners. Though the platform is mainly aimed at third-party developers, Weeby has also built a few titles of its own, like Mecha-Mecha Panic, Doki Stars, and Bubble Story.

Weeby won't say how much money those have earned, but Carter said they've generated a revenue stream "that's given us confidence to launch this [compensation] program." In the past, Weeby, founded in 2011, paid its people much like other startups, with an emphasis on equity and a plea to take pay cuts in order to be part of something that could "change the world." That meant salaries in the $60,000 to $70,000 range, even for executives. Carter himself collects just $59,000 in base salary. But it became clear "we were doing this wrong....Even when we find people who want to work here [many would say] 'I just can't at this price point.'" As a result, Carter said, "we lost a lot of candidates." A million dollars in four years About nine months ago, Weeby took the initial steps toward restructuring its compensation program. Here's how it works: New hires get a base salary commensurate with their experience -- at least $100,000, and more than they were previously paid.

They join with the promise, if they perform well, of automatic $10,000 monthly bumps until they hit $250,000. Even then, the raises continue, so that after four years, it adds up to a million. Weeby doesn't ignore equity, offering up to four times what similar-sized Valley startups do, Carter said. Employees, in fact, will own more of Weeby than even its biggest investor. The salaries aren't paid in a vacuum. Equally important, Carter believes, is transparency, so no one wonders what others are making. All Weeby applicants must pass a coding test, which takes the form of a traditional role-playing game tasking them with fighting monsters -- while also navigating the vagaries of Web servers and other technical challenges.Photo by Weeby.co Weeby would hardly be the first company to implement a transparent compensation system, or one that pays most people the same. Indeed, one inspiration for the program is Next , the computer company that Steve Jobs founded after his ouster from Apple in 1985 and that was subsequently bought by Apple in 1996.

Next paid senior staff $75,000 a year, and everyone else got $50,000, regardless of experience. Not every Weeby engineer will earn the million dollars. Weeby will subject everyone to monthly performance reviews, and managers will make quick decisions, either granting the next $10,000 raise or offering feedback about needed improvement. Some will be terminated but given a "healthy severance" of at least $20,000, plus references. Ultimately, Carter said, Weeby's new program "is not about paying people over market. It's way more about finding the best engineers, who could earn that level of all-in compensation now or in the future and giving them a clear way to get there....You should work here because the culture's amazing, one of the best teams in the world, and do really cool things with technology." Before any paychecks, though, new engineers first have to pass Weeby's rigorous coding test, which was designed to determine who's got the required engineering chops. "This allows us in an interview to focus on what it is like to work with this person," Carter said.

"We'll already know they're $250,000 engineers. [Then] we just want to know that they're a good [cultural] fit." 'Missionaries, not mercenaries' Weeby isn't looking at using its new hiring program to get huge. Rather, it wants to grow from 22 people to perhaps 40. But it's all about who those people are. "I expect the right 40 people at Weeby," Carter said, "to be able to compete with companies with 200 people." But while Carter wants to build Weeby's roster of superstar engineers, he also plans on evangelizing the program near and far, because he thinks it will help keep top talent in the Valley and out of the hands of high-paying Wall Street investment banks. "The greater story is that this is not just a way we can briefly compete," he said. "It represents a fundamental shift [toward making] startups and Silicon Valley more competitive with the rest of the world." Plus, he said, paying substantially more than today's market rate for engineers should make startups "able to move quicker than Microsoft, Google, etc." But not everyone agrees that it's smart to pay engineers more than market rate.

It's "a horrific idea," said Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator , Silicon Valley's most prestigious technology incubator. "It seems on paper like a really good idea [since] great engineers can create huge value. [But] here's why it doesn't work: You really want a company full of missionaries, not mercenaries. And so if your company is known as the place where you can make a huge cash salary, you end up attracting" the worst cultural fits. Y Combinator president Sam AltmanPhoto by Sam Altman via Twitter Altman added that startups should look for their first 20 to 50 employees to be "maniacally dedicated" to the company and its products, and to "believe it's bigger than themselves. They believe there's a purpose to what they're doing. That's what inspires people to do great things." Steve Newcomb, a three-time Silicon Valley founder who's currently CEO of Famo.us, a developer of a JavaScript framework that lets people build cross-platform apps, thinks startups that pay above market rate are foolish.

"If you have to pay people more money than market to come work for your company," Newcomb said, "then that's a statement of the value of your product and the value of your company. I believe the right way is to pay market, and stay strict to that." Beyond attracting the wrong type of engineers, Newcomb said paying above market also may upset investors and "make it difficult to raise money down the road." Both Altman and Newcomb spoke generally, and not specifically about Weeby. But Weeby's investors believe in Carter's vision. "Getting technical talent is more important than ever, and particularly here in the Valley, it's tough," said Peter Bell, a partner at Highland Capital Partners who is on Weeby's board. "Michael [Carter], who's a terrific entrepreneur, came up with this idea that's an aggressive, fair, transparent, and open way to get the best technical talent." Bell wants to be sure the program isn't simply a gimmick and is sustainable, but argued that although Weeby will pay more per employee, hiring top-tier talent will reduce the company's overall cost structure.

"You'd rather have a team of eight superstars," Bell said, "than a team of 16 mediocre" engineers. Another supporter is Karl Jacob , a longtime investor and founder who, among others, advised Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook was just a six-person team. Jacob is currently a Weeby adviser and a fan of its compensation program, in part because it takes care of early employees, especially those below the executive level. "We've gotten good at rewarding founders," Jacob said. "I don't think we've gotten as good at rewarding [those] one or two levels below that." Among those who criticize the general concept of paying engineers substantially more than market rate, a common refrain was that such a plan must be the brainchild of a first-time founder. Carter isn't that, but he recognizes the sentiment -- and rejects it. "Silicon Valley's about getting a great team together and trying new things," Carter said. "Every time you try new things, and build brand-new innovative technology, you always get this response that, 'Oh, it's a first-time team that's inexperienced.'" In the Valley, he argued, people should celebrate risk-takers, even those who haven't been around the block.

"When you do something for the first time, it allows you to approach something with a fresh eye," he said. "Sometimes, you get a result like Google, Facebook, or Snapchat." Pando: Revealed: Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees LinkedIn From The News Desk “British medieval ordinances of Bristol cobblers in 1364 state, ‘Masters are forbidden to poach workers from other members of the craft.’” — Orly Lobel, Talent Wants To Be Free Back in January, I wrote about " The Techtopus " — an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. The agreement prompted a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in a settlement in which the companies agreed to curb their restricting hiring deals. The same companies were then hit with a civil suit by employees affected by the agreements.

This week, as the final summary judgement for the resulting class action suit looms, and several of the companies mentioned (Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm) scramble to settle out of court, Pando has obtained court documents (embedded below) which show shocking evidence of a much larger conspiracy, reaching far beyond Silicon Valley. Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees. According to multiple sources familiar with the case, several of these newly named companies were also subpoenaed by the DOJ for their investigation. A spokesperson for Ask.com confirmed that in 2009-10 the company was investigated by the DOJ, and agreed to cooperate fully with that investigation. Other companies confirmed off the record that they too had been subpoenaed around the same time.

Although the Department ultimately decided to focus its attention on just Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, the emails and memos clearly name dozens more companies which, at least as far as Google and Apple executives were concerned, formed part of their wage-fixing cartel. A confidential Google memo (above, left) titled “Special Agreement Hiring Policy,” dating from November 2006, divides the company's wage-fixing agreements into two categories: “Do Not Cold Call” and “Sensitive Companies.” Below that, the Google memo offers a brief chronology and list of companies: The following companies have special agreements with Google and are part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list. The first entry marks the beginning of Google’s participation in the wage-suppression scheme: Effective March 6, 2005: Genentech, Inc. • Intel Corporation • Apple Computer • Paypal, Inc. • Comcast Corporation Until now, neither Paypal (owned by eBay), Comcast nor Genentech have been publicly mentioned as part of the wage-suppression cartel.

Nor have they been publicly named in criminal or civil actions relating to this particular case, although both the DOJ and the state of California are currently pursuing a separate but related antitrust suits against eBay. The "effective date" of Google's first wage-fixing agreements, early March 2005, follows a few weeks after Steve Jobs threatened Google’s Sergey Brin to stop all recruiting at Apple: “if you hire a single one of these people,” Jobs emailed Brin, “that means war.” Jobs threatened Brin and Google on February 17, 2005; nine days later, Apple's VP for Human Resources sent out an internal email to Apple recruiting, All, Please add Google to your "hands-off" list. We recently agreed not to recruit from one another so if you hear of any recruiting they are doing against us, please be sure to let me know. Please also be sure to honor our side of the deal.

That was February 26; on March 6, Google's identical non-solicitation agreement with Apple became "effective." This timeline is important to establish because it demonstrates precisely what makes this scheme illegal: secret cross-agreements between two or more parties to fix wages in the labor market, at a time when tech engineer wages were soaring , threatening profits. This is just a tiny sample of the "overwhelming" evidence used by both the Justice Department's antitrust division, and the District Court judge in San Jose, to debunk the company executives' claims that each had coincidentally implemented identical non-solicitation policies at the same time, with the same companies, without knowing what the other side was doing. From that point on, the secret cartel expanded. Later that year, in September 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman called Schmidt complaining that Google’s recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay.

Schmidt emailed Google’s “Executive Management Committee”—the company’s top executives— summarizing Whitman’s, and “the valley”’s view that competing for workers by offering higher pay packages was “unfair”: From: Eric Schmidt Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2005 10:52 PM Subject: Phone call from Meg Whitman DO NOT FORWARD Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said: 1. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving up salaries across the board. People are just waiting for us to fall and get back at us for our “unfair” practices now. 2. Our recruiting practices are “zero sum” and it appears that somewhere in Google we are targeting EBay to “hurt them” and its the reputation that we are doing this against Yahoo, EBay and MSFT (I denied this.) Schmidt’s email clearly prioritizes Whitman's and other CEOs' concerns over the rights of employees or the concept of fair competition, even ordering a Google executive to "fire the recruiter [who offended Whitman] immediately." Schmidt's email ends: This was a rough call from a good friend. We need to get this fixed.

Within weeks of Whitman’s call to Schmidt, eBay was placed on a Google list of “Sensitive” companies, for whom Google placed fewer restrictions on its recruiters except at the executive recruitment level. It was at this time that Google began to internally formalize its illegal wage-suppression pacts—and Schmidt was clearly worried about getting caught. In early October, 2005, Google’s Senior VP for Human Resources, Shona Brown, emailed Schmidt a draft list of companies on their “Do Not Call” and “Sensitive” lists, and the policy protocols. Schmidt responded: “This looks very good Eric” Schmidt was then asked if Google sales executive Omid Kordestani could share “with Ebay/PP the rules as they pertain to them?” Schmidt responded: “I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric” Google's HR head at the time, Shona Brown, agreed with her boss, in lower-case ee cummings syntax: “makes sense to do orally.

i agree.” A year later, by the end of 2006, Google upgraded eBay to its “Do Not Cold Call” list, joining OpenTV, Nvidia Technologies, and Intuit along with the original five companies. Google’s “Sensitive” companies list (right) had meanwhile grown to include AOL, AskJeeves, Clear Channel, Earthlink, IBM, Lycos, and NTL, a major British cable company known today as Virgin Media. Some of the companies Pando contacted for this article insisted, off the record, that they had not agreed to appear on Google or Apple's lists, and that there were no reciprocal non-solicitation agreements. Indeed, that same line of defense was used by many of the defendants in the current case. Of course, it's possible that Google, Apple or others simply added companies to their don't recruit lists without coordinating with them first. That said, as we see from the Whitman and Jobs emails above, addition to the list was frequently prompted by an angry phone call or heated discussion. One example of this is Dell who, despite not being listed in the civil suit or DOJ investigation, was included on Google's "don't call" list after an angry email from Michael Dell himself.

On April 19, 2007, Dell wrote to Schmidt [typos Dell's—M.A.]: Eric, I learned recently that Google extend an offer to one of our sales guys, [REDACTED]. Not real happy about this and not the kind of think we would expect given our partnership. We should discuss next time we are together but I think we should have a general understanding that we are not actively recruiting from each other. Michael Two days later, Schmidt forwarded Dell's email to two top Google HR executives, and added his own comment up top: Lets put them on the "don't call into Dell" list for a while. Thanks eric We'll continue to press companies to comment on the record regarding any discussions which may have caused them to be added to Google or Apple's lists. * * * * Incredible as it may seem, the Techtopus was just getting started. Between the end of 2006 and early 2008, its tentacles multiplied, reaching into the lives of workers across the globe and across more industries.

A confidential Google document titled “Special Agreement Hiring Policy,” dated January 7, 2008, expanded the categories and definitions of the company’s secret deals. What started as a two-page memo in late 2006, had now grown to a list nine pages long. Under a new category, “Restricted Hiring,” the Google memo lists four firms and their subsidiares: Parent Companies: Microsoft • Novell • Oracle • Sun Microsystems These companies alone had a combined workforce of well over 200,000 employees. However, the protocols under “Restricted Hiring” limited the wage-theft pact to manager-level and above: “For each of these ‘Restricted Hiring’ companies, Google has agreed to the following protocol. 1. Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A roles — even if they have applied to Google; 2. However, there are no restrictions to our recruiting from these companies at individual contributor levels for PSG&A; 3. Additionally, there are no restrictions at any level for engineering candidates.

Under Google’s “Do Not Cold Call” list, the number of companies doubled from five to 11, but the number of employees potentially affected grew several times more than that: The following companies (and by association their subsidiaries listed in Appendix A) have special agreements with Google and are part of the ‘Do Not Cold Call’ list. Parent Companies: Apple, Inc • Comcast Corporation • DoubleClick • Genentech • IBM Corporation (Junior hires okay—also applies to subsidiaries) • Illumita • Intel Corporation • Intuit • Microsoft • Oglivy • WPP These combined workforce of just these eleven companies totaled over 775,000 in 2008. The antitrust lawsuit going to trial in May affects only 100,000 employees of seven tech firms (although three have since settled out of court), leaving most of the firms listed on Google’s confidential documents out. But we’re not done yet. Google’s list of “Sensitive Companies,” requiring recruiters to check with Google’s executives first (which could and did mean Google informing on the prospect to his or her employer), is as follows: Parent Companies: AOL, Inc. • Ask.com • Clear Channel Communications, Inc. • Dell, Inc.

• Earthlink, Inc • Virgin Media, Inc. (Formerly NTL, Inc.) Beneath that list, a rather cryptic warning suggesting that all across industries, illegal non-solicitation agreements were common everywhere: “Please be cautious when recruiting teams from any company to keep our candidates and potential employees safe from legal action. Most companies have non-solicit agreements which would limit or prohibit a candidate from asking a coworker to interview with us as well.” That passage alone is a stunning example of not just flagrantly illegal practices—it also shows how few rights companies assume their employees are entitled to, rights that Americans take for granted—such as the right to free speech, the right to assembly, the right to ask one's own co-worker if he or she would be interested in taking a better job somewhere else... But back to the Techtopus: Finally, Google’s 2008 memo lists 18 staffing agencies which Google has agreed not to recruit from: “As a general rule, we should not be recruiting staffing talent from any of our approved staffing partners. The lists on the following page outline these partners for both the U.S.

and International staffing.” Among the staffing agencies listed: Kelly Services (US and worldwide), Kforce, CDI Business Solutions, Adecco, and others. And Google isn’t the only company that kept a list. Buried in the court dockets is an email from Apple recruiting manager David Alvarez to fellow Apple recruiting manager Jonathan Geyer, dated July 9, 2009, containing a document titled “Hands Off (Do Not Call List).” That list includes the other six firms charged by the DOJ and originally named in the wage-suppression class action: Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucas. But the Apple “Do Not Call” list also includes an additional 21 companies not mentioned in the DOJ investigation or the class action suit. Among the companies that appear to have conspired with Apple to suppress their employees’ wages: Microsoft, AMD, Best Buy, Cingular, Foxconn, Nvidia, and a handful of distributors like Mac Zone, PC Connection and PC Mall.

Some of the companies are on Apple’s “Do Not Call List” because, according to the memo, they share “common board members”: Intuit, JCrew, Nike, and Genentech, whose CEO at the time, Arthur Levinson, sat on Apple’s board of directors . All of the above is just what's in the mountain of pre-trial court documents. It's highly likely that more names will spill out during testimony. Pando will continue to report any new developments and also will be covering the summary judgment hearing next week. For now, it’s enough to try to absorb what all of these cross-company, cross-industry secret labor-fixing agreements mean. Most labor stories about wage theft and corporate abuse tend to focus on low-wage earners and the most disadvantaged. Certainly it strains one’s sensibilities to compare an exploited low-wage worker in the fast food or retail industry to tech engineers and programmers, who are far better compensated, live more comfortably, and rarely worry about putting food in their children’s mouths.

In terms of pathos, there is no comparison; minimum wage earners are struggling to survive, and nearly all of the well-educated, privileged-born people in the media world agree that tech industry workers are all a bunch of overpaid misogynist libertarian bros, a caricature that makes it perfectly fine to hate the entire class, and impossible to consider them as political comrades stuck in the same predicament as the rest of the non-multimillionaires in this country.

What’s more important is the political predicament that low-paid fast food workers share with well-paid hi-tech workers: the loss of power over their lives and their futures to the growing mass of concentrated power in Silicon Valley, whose tentacles are so strong now and so great, that hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe—public relations and cable company employees in the British Isles, programmers and tech engineers in Russia and China (according to other documents which I'll write about soon)—have their lives controlled and their wages and opportunities stolen from them without ever knowing about it, all the while being bombarded with cultural cant about the wisdom of the free market, about the efficiency of free knowledge, about the need to take personal responsibility and to blame no one but yourself for everything that happens in your life and your career. * * * * Editor's note: Comment from companies mentioned in this report Pando attempted to contact the companies mentioned by name in this report, requesting comment on the civil lawsuit (and in some cases, separate DOJ investigations). All of these requests were made at least two business hours before publication, in line with Pando's standard comment request policy .

For ease of reading, due to the sheer volume of companies involved, except where specific facts are being disputed, we have grouped all of the comments below, rather than including them inline. We will continue to update the list below as we receive additional comment. An Intuit spokesperson responded with this statement: "[T]he current lawsuit against eBay mentions Intuit, but we are not named as defendants in the suit. Regarding the civil case: Intuit entered into a settlement in the High Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation. We have agreed to resolve this matter without acknowledging any wrongdoing. We continue to believe our actions were fully compliant with the law. This was an expensive and burdensome case and we wanted to put it behind us. Intuit represents approximately 5 percent of the proposed class. Regarding Bill Campbell’s role: Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit’s board, is a board member at Apple and had served as an advisor to Google. He is recognized across companies for being uniquely collaborative and procompetitive. Throughout Silicon Valley, he has played an important and productive role in building relationships that foster innovation.

Regarding the current allegations from the High Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation: Then and today, Bill takes his fiduciary and advisory responsibilities at Intuit seriously, and we believe all of Bill’s actions have fully complied with the law." An eBay/PayPal spokesperson did not comment on the civil class action suit, but gave Pando the following statement regarding their separate DOJ investigation: "eBay continues to believe that the Department of Justice and California Attorney General have taken an unprecedented and aggressive approach to their enforcement of antitrust laws in this instance. Nevertheless, eBay is engaging in discussions with the Department of Justice and California Attorney General regarding the possible resolution of this action and believes that a stay of the action will avoid unnecessary use resources while those discussions are pending." An Intel spokesperson told Pando: "We don't think we violated any laws, and we are going to continue to defend ourselves." A Virgin Media spokesperson told Pando: "Virgin Media operates solely in the UK.

I appreciate Google also recruits here but I don’t believe we’re involved in what sounds like a US lawsuit." An Adobe spokesperson told Pando: "Adobe does not comment on pending litigation." A Kelly spokesperson said the company "does not comment on pending litigation against a customer." A spokesperson for Nike told Pando "Nike is unaware of any such agreement and have no further comment." A spokesperson for AMD declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for AOL declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Cingular/AT&T declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Dell declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Oracle declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment for this story. Adecco, Apple, Best Buy, CDI Business Solutions, Clear Channel, Comcast, Dreamworks, Foxconn, Genentech, Inc., Google, IBM, Illumita, Jcrew, Kforce, Lucasfilm, Mac Zone, Novell, Nvidia, Oglivy, OpenTV, PC Connection, PC Mall, Pixar, Sun Microsystems and WPP either could not be reached, or had not responded to requests for comment as of publication time. Follow all of our Techtopus coverage here .

* * * * Silicon Valley Companies Add New Benefit For Women: Egg-Freezing : All Tech Considered : NPR A technician opens a vessel containing women's frozen egg cells in April 2011 in Amsterdam. AFP/Getty Images In the Silicon Valley arms race to lure the top talent with the best benefits, Facebook and Apple are adding egg freezing for female employees. The two companies may be the first to pay for the procedure for women who choose it to delay childbearing. The addition of egg-freezing to the benefits plan comes as tech companies face mounting pressure to hire more women. And it's a perk that some women may find attractive. Brigitte Adams started a community forum called Eggsurance , where women can share information about the procedure. Adams paid for the procedure herself. "I froze my eggs at 39," she says, "and there was nothing out there that was specific to egg-freezing." The American Society of Reproductive Medicine only lifted the experimental label from egg-freezing two years ago . Adams, a marketing executive at a tech startup, says the addition of coverage for the procedure definitely would give extra weight to a job offer.

Related NPR Stories "I would equate it to reimbursement for an MBA program," she says, "or adoption assistance, or, you know — it's not the be-all and end-all, but it's definitely a nice perk." Article continues after sponsorship And an expensive one — the benefit covers $20,000 worth of procedures, typically two rounds of egg retrieval. Then again, rich Silicon Valley companies are notorious for high-end benefits that can include gourmet food, dry cleaning and massages. Cali Williams Yost, who consults with companies about work/life balance, says covering the cost of egg-freezing as an elective procedure could help keep some good female employees. (The benefit also is available to employees' spouses.) "By offering to pay for women to freeze their eggs, I think Silicon Valley is responding to what some of the young, talented women in their workforce want," she says. But, Williams Yost says, enabling female employees in particular to delay having children isn't all that's needed: At some point, those workers will have children and also will need the right benefits then.

"They are going to need the direct supports, the flexibility, the caregiving," she says, "leaves and benefits that actually help them combine work and life. Egg-freezing is a great small piece of a much bigger puzzle." Facebook told NPR that its offering this benefit because employees were asking for it. In a statement, Apple also said it wanted to make certain its female employees could "do the best work of their lives." Both companies have paid parental leave policies and on-site health care. Facebook also subsidizes day care costs. But Marcy Darnovsky, executive director at the Center for Genetics and Society, says that expanding benefits to cover egg-freezing could put pressure on women to delay childbearing so that their employer can get more hours out of them. Darnovsky is an advocate for the responsible use of reproductive technologies. "When you're in a situation of your employer offering you a choice," she says, "you really have to be careful that you're distinguishing between something that's an expanded option and something that's actually subtle or even explicit pressure to do what your employer wants you to do." But Darnovsky says there is also a virtue in egg-freezing because it does give women more choices and control over their lives.

Egg-freezing is no guarantee of having a child, though. Studies indicate that women who have three rounds of egg retrieval at around $10,000 per round have a slightly more than 30 percent chance of giving birth if they are 25 or younger when the eggs are frozen. The closer women get to age 40, the lower the likelihood of success. If women limit themselves to the two rounds of egg retrieval covered by the new benefits, that also will reduce the odds. Eggsurance forum founder Brigitte Adams froze her eggs when she was 39. She says she didn't do it for career reasons, but to give herself as many options as she could given the circumstances of her life, and that that's why many women she knows did the procedure. "We're doing it maybe because our life didn't take the course we expected it to, she says, "and we're older and we want to have children and, hey, there's this new technology that may help us do that." Adams is currently single, and she says freezing her eggs has made it easier for her to look for the right partner without feeling as much pressure from her biological clock.

If Apple's Diversity Is Meh, Silicon Valley Is Failing Miserably | Regator If Apple's Diversity Is Meh, Silicon Valley Is Failing Miserably News : Huffington Post SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc on Wednesday reported improvements in gender and ethnic diversity in June as the U.S. technology company stayed ahead of fellow Silicon Valley power houses Google and Facebook Inc in hiring minorities. Apple also said in its annual diversity and inclusion report that it had closed pay gaps over the last year by analyzing salaries, bonuses and annual stock grants. Silicon Valley & San Jose Sightseeing Tours ...Or E-Mail: tourpilot@outlook.com Silicon Valley -San Jose Sightseeing Tour Silicon Valley and its "capital" San Jose have revolutionized not only global communications but also how we manage our daily lives. Come see where several hundred thousand creative minds are modeling and engineering all sorts of future possibilities. We custom design your tour and will pick you up anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area. The fee for our usual 8-hour version of this tour is $630 for 1-3 passengers, $660 for 4-6...assuming pick-up and drop-off in/near downtown San Francisco.

(During Pacific Standard Time--roughly November thru March--due to less daylight, our tour is closer to 7 hours, and less expensive: $570.) If your pick-up and,or drop-off is closer to San Jose than San Francisco, then our fee is $690 for 1-6 passengers; if you're willing/able to travel at least to Palo Alto or Mountain View by Caltrain, then this fee may be discounted. Before planning to book this tour, please fully appreciate the following: If you want to tour the workspaces and meeting places inside Google, Apple or any of the better known Silicon Valley companies, you must make those arrangements (directly with the desired company) yourself since we do not have any special access to them and none offer tours to the public. In other words, we'd be happy to take you to headquarters for photos from the exteriors, but we cannot get you into workplaces without you making the necessary reservations in advance. Once you're close to finalizing those arrangements, then we can incorporate them into a customized full-day itinerary.

FYI, the following sites have retail outlets for the general public on the premises: Google (logo'd apparel and other types of merchandise...closed weekends); The Tech Museum; NASA Ames; the Intel Museum; the Computer History Museum (in our opinion the best of the lot) with books, videos, posters, chachkies. Sorry, but we almost never offer our Silicon Valley tour to groups of more than 6 participants--usually when you both: contact us at least 6 weeks in advance; and have a clear and specific plan of the sites you want to visit (and why). For groups of more than 6, consider contacting Shaun Prescott at San Jose Silicon Valley Tours: 408-241-3707 info@sjsvtours.com. We get many inquiries for this tour from solo travelers or couples basically requesting to be matched with other travelers so as to make the tour more affordable:unfortunately, two parties wanting the same (or similar) itinerary on the same date seldom happens for us. So if our fee doesn't fit your budget, then we probably cannot accommodate you.

Options for your Tour new Levi's Stadium (49ers), Sunnyvale...offers tours Winchester Mystery House, San Jose Hakone Japanese Garden, Saratoga Rosicrucian Museum (Egyptian antiquities), San Jose Buck's restaurant (bizarre collectables everywhere you look--so un-usual there's a book), Woodside All these attractions have their own websites, so we recommend that you peruse them in choosing your priorities for the day. Silicon Valley & San Jose Tour Itinerary You must choose which attractions are most important for you to see as visiting more than 4 major sites in a single day is nearly impossible. You may, for example, want to experience Stanford University, the intellectual wellspring of much of Silicon Valley's innovation and one of the truly great universities of the world: Silicon Valley is where it is because Stanford is there. Hour-long, student-led walking tours are offered daily, most of the year. These tours cover several main attractions, with an historical overview. An even more comprehensive tour by golf cart may be available--if you're a group of 4 or fewer and book at least 2 weeks in advance. There's even a tour devoted just to Stanford's science and engineering quad.

In nearby Palo Alto we often drive through the charming, leafy "Professorville" neighborhood, stop at the HP Garage (the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley") and see Steve Jobs' last home..and in respect for his family's privacy we do not get out of our vehicle. Usually we have lunch at a cafe specializing in great sandwiches, pizza or Indian cuisine. Or if you want to sample what this "Valley of Heart's Delight" was like before modern technology, we can visit one of the oldest houses in the area, have lunch at the golf club near its windmill. The Computer History Museum can provide the focal point of your visit--it is probably the world's best, a veritable Smithsonian of rare artifacts and technological innovation and the stories behind them. With funding from many private donors (including Bill Gates), the Museum has created an exciting 19-room exhibit called "R/evolution: the First 2000 Years of Computing"...if you're a true geek (or business historian), it's recommended that you budget at least 90 minutes for appreciating it.

(The daily docent tours are usually excellent.) Afterwards you can walk around as much of the grounds of the nearby Googleplex as Google's security will allow. Google now has a moderately sized store open to the public, which offers merchandise imprinted with their logo. Intel has a very interesting Museum at their headquarters, one that features the history of, concepts behind, and the design and manufacture of microchips—the essential core of every computer—and explains the operation of "clean room" facilities. Usually you guide yourself, though docent-led tours can be arranged with sufficient notice. Close by there's also the NASA Ames Exploration Center with its Living and Working in Space exhibit among others. Tesla's all-electric Model S was named "Car of the Year" by Motor Trend magazine (Nov '12); Consumer Reports said it's the "best car they have ever tested." There are so many features to admire about Tesla--its truly innovative design, zero emissions, the fact that it's made less than 20 miles away in Fremont by American workers. If you become a prospective customer--and you have a confirmed reservation*--they may even take you out on a test drive. Apple's current main headquarters has a retail store (open weekdays).

Sometimes we sneak a peek at their new "spaceship" headquarters...under construction. The San Francisco Forty-Niners recently (August 2014) opened an innovative Levi's Stadium: we can possibly accommodate into a longer itinerary one of their guided tours, or just drive by. Oracle has one of the more beautiful corporate headquarters--blue glass towers rising above a lagoon. The Tech Museum in downtown San Jose is highly regarded by the museum community with its many exhibits (including an IMAX theater) mostly oriented towards elementary to high-school aged children. If there's time and little traffic, some may choose to drive-by a selected few of the following headquarters: Adobe, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Electronic Arts, Cisco. In early 2012 Facebook moved into a new headquarters, but like Google is a "closed campus." BTW Twitter, Salesforce, Zynga and Craigslist are headquartered in San Francisco...Genentec in South San Francisco...Netflix in beautiful Los Gatos, 40 miles to the south.

You may decide to play hooky so as to: appreciate the elegant Hakone (Japanese) Gardens (3 times larger than the more famous one in Golden Gate Park) in quaint Saratoga; tour heiress Sara Winchester's reportedly haunted Mystery House; visit the Rosicrucian Museum (the largest display of ancient Egyptian treasures on the West Coast); stroll through a little bit of Spain--an art village called Allied Arts, along a secluded creek across from Stanford; cruise Santa Cruz' Beach Boardwalk, an old-fashioned seaside amusement park (with its Giant Dipper, voted one of the nation's best wooden roller-coasters). Or visit a winery or two in the Santa Cruz Mountains region. So decide on your priorities, and we'll make a day of multi-faceted and ever dynamic Silicon Valley. Why tour Silicon Valley and San Jose with A Friend in Town and not just rent your own car? Because it's often hard to reach sites in Silicon Valley--most are not walking distance apart, public transit is sparse, and traffic frequently slows to a crawl. We put what you're seeing in an historical context, respond to your questions, and help you optimize your time, minimize your stress, maximize your enjoyment.

FYI we can pick you off/ drop you off: in or near San Francisco; in San Jose or its nearby suburbs (Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Cupertino, et. al.); at SFO; at San Jose's Mineta International airport; at Oakland's airport. The other guys are on a big bus, tour sporadically, and have much less experience in the Valley than we do. * Tesla is so popular that test drives usually require appointments made at least a week in advance. The showroom staff asks that you are at least 25 years old, with a valid US Driver's License or an International Driver's License (with "International" displayed in English). There are so many reasons why we're your best choice for a tour of Silicon Valley and San Jose. What will it Cost? Because each tour is designed to fit your interests, our fees vary. Basically you pay by the number of hours in your itinerary. We do not add the fuel surcharges, "license fees," "tax" and mandatory gratuities that many other companies do. FEE

Question: What "valley" is home to many tech companies including Apple, Google, and Facebook?
Answer: Silicon