Grinding XP until I Ding Vice President

A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies use numerical hierarchies that rank you into tiers based off of seniority and position. For example, if you start as a new college grad software engineer at NetApp you’ll start as a MTS 1 (Member of Technical Staff, Level 1). At SAP, you’ll be a SE 1 (Software Engineer level 1). Promotion increases the number next to your title. If you’re there for a year or so and do good work, you’ll see a salary bonus increase and an increase in the number next to you name. Boom, now you’re a level 2. You move up the ladder. You can tell people you’re a “level 2.” Everyone’s happy.

Whether you’re Google, eBay, NetApp or Microsoft, numerical hierarchies are all the rage. I imagine that it makes a lot of things easier for HR folks to so clearly delimit rank and order by number. But I suspect that there’s another reason why this kind of numbering system is used as opposed to the traditional “junior, associate, senior, executive” or “associate, partner” scale used in traditional firms.

My crackpot idea: it’s because of Dungeons and Dragons and Final Fantasy. It’s because we nerds love to level up.

There’s something cool about having an elegant and clearly defined line of advancement. Knowing where your rank ends and the next one begins is a great incentive to work harder for that higher number, and there’s a very real sense of accomplishment when you visibly advance from one level to another. This kind of appeal is one of the reasons why a lot of people play games like World of Warcraft. The challenge is clearly defined, and when you work hard and conquer it you’re clearly marked for your hard work (phat lewt, clearly a level 80, new titles, etc.)

Just like in WoW or in Oblivion, working hard at your job to get that next level is a sort of addiction unto itself. But unlike online or pen and paper RPGs, this type of fanatical obsession with incrementing a number is socially acceptible. Even for the non-geeks that don’t go crazy when they hear a “ding” sound and a glowing yellow halo appear around their avatar (I’m still waiting to see this happen in real life, by the way), it’s cool to get promoted because it gets you access to tons of new toys. You get new cars, new houses, new opportunities to ball out of control around the bay area. So unlike staying at home and playing WoW, working hard and levelling up in the office is a socially “good” thing.

Geeks love leveling up and all of the other cool things that come with it. If you tell a geek he can increase his STR or CON stat by working out in the gym with enough polish, I’m sure he’d pump iron like Arnold every day just so he can go home and change his character sheet every once in a while. So is it any wonder that smart companies tier their employees based off of RPG-esque numbering systems and arm them with flashy “phat lewtz” such as exclusive swag, all the while promoting a social structure that promotes workaholic tendencies because it makes you rich and thus cool? Call me a crazy man, but I seriously wonder if this appeal to the inner geek is another way to get us all to take the job all the more personally and work much harder and much longer.

I guess we should all be lucky though: at least we don’t have to run Molten Core for a living.

The Netbook and the Demand Function: How Technological Development Can Thrive in a Recession

For economists in Microeconomics and Consumer Choice, the demand function (or demand schedule) is one of the most powerful analysis tools at their disposal. The market demand function is a powerful information machine that processes an extraordinary amount of data about market variables and returns them in a legible and quantitative analysis-ready format. From the demand for another competitor’s good to the expectations of the market, the results of a demand function reflect not only upon what consumers in the market want. They also reflect on the market itself.

As of the time of this writing, the United States (and much of the developed world) is in a significant economic recession. According to the Department of Labor, the United States’ unemployment rate rose to 7.8% in January 2009 and U.S. imports are down 1.1%[1]. Both are signs of a weakened domestic economy, as the unemployment rate continues to be a salient variable in determining the overall health of the economy and the import rate is an indicator of how willing and able US companies and households are to invest and purchase foreign goods. Here in California, home to Silicon Valley – the home of powerful software and hardware names such as Intel, Google and Yahoo!, the situation is particularly dire. California reported an unemployment rate of 10.1% in January, 29% higher than the national average[2] . Major tech firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have engaged with massive layoffs in an effort to cut costs as banks and investment firms have turned gun-shy at helping them finance their operations in the downfall of major investment banking companies such as Lehman Brothers. In this environment of scarce resources, it seems nearly suicidal for technology companies to dare to innovate and produce new technology through demanding and potentially fruitless research and development investment when so much is on the line.

And then came the Netbook.