Money and wine flow freely in the Valley

The mercury hit a record 109 Fahrenheit/42 Celsius last week in San Jose, and that wasn't all that was hot, hot, hot. So are the salaries of Silicon Valley chief executives - they netted an incredible $2.3 billion in (€2.4 billion) compensation in 1999. That's for salary plus options, a 70 per cent increase on the previous year. The figures come courtesy of Valley newspaper the San Jose Mercury News, which released its annual "What The Boss Makes" salary survey last Sunday.

As the paper notes, nearly all the increase came from the de facto currency of the Valley, stock options, which were worth $1.75 billion of the total figure - an 80 per cent gain over 1998's figures.

Looking over the past six years of surveys, it's fairly clear that this baroque level of financial excess comes thanks to the Internet. In 1994 at the dawn of the Web, for example, Valley chief executives received about $500 million in compensation. The reign of the option came with the skyrocketing valuations of the dot.coms and all the companies that provide Net infrastructure.

The list of the chief executives in the top 10 also reflects the dominance of the Web. Leading the pack is Mr John Chambers, head of Cisco (a Net infrastructure company), who took home - ready? - $121,701,629.

Numbers two, three, four and 10 on the list are all Yahoo executives. At six, seven, eight and nine are more Net infrastructure company executives.

To me, the most interesting and gratifying addition to the list is at number five, Ms Carleton S. Fiorina, aka Carly Fiorina, the new chief executive and president of Hewlett-Packard, until recently a mostly non-Net company. She's the first woman ever to crack the top 10.

She made $69,435,638 in 1999, and didn't even put in a full year. You go, girl! Unfortunately, the rest of the picture is not so great for women in this hugely male-dominated field. Only 45 women appear on the list of 767 and there's a big gap between Ms Fiorina and the rest.

Number two in compensation for women is E*Trade president and chief operations officer Ms Kathy Levinson, who made $16,687,167. She's a good illustration of the power of the option, though. Of that amount, only (only!) $927,167 was salary. Her gain on options was $15,760,000.

There's plenty of interesting reading on the survey, which can be accessed on the Web (URL below); a good sense of perspective is provided by Mercury News columnist Mr Dan Gillmor.

My favourite item from the survey, though, comes under the company listings. Look up Apple. Four executives and their multimillion compensation amounts appear on the list. After those four, the list includes Apple cofounder and chief executive Mr Steven Jobs, who got $1 (you read that right) in pay and no gains from shares, for a total compensation package of $1.

Mr Jobs takes just $1 annually as token compensation, even though he has pretty much singlehandedly resuscitated a company many had given up for dead.

Elsewhere, the papers have been full of dot.com backlash. Along with plenty of gloating among those who remain unaffected over the crash in dot.com valuations and share prices, a lot of people are just tired of the trendy, affluent 20 and 30-somethings who work for them and their gradual encroachment into working class, rural or ethnic enclaves in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

A few stories to this effect peppered the online media some time ago - on Salon.com, for example - but now the unease has also reached the mainstream press. The mostly-Hispanic residents of the colourful, Mission District of San Francisco, for example, feel they are being shouldered out of their community by the dot.commers, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of the many wall murals in the district shows a Hispanic family in a car, leaving the city by the Bay Bridge. Under it is printed: "Adios, San Francisco. Evicted and Exiled. Resist the Dot.Con." And in Salinas, an agricultural town a few miles from San Jose made famous by Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck, many object to Cisco's plans to build a huge corporate "campus" among some of the last remaining farmers' fields and oak-covered hills in the region.

Certainly, neighbourhoods change anyway. The Mission District was once mostly German and Irish. The Germans are assimilated and invisible while the Irish have colonised the Geary Boulevard and surrounding "Avenues" district of the city. But the hyper-speed, Net-driven gentrification of neighbourhoods that are valued by many, not least for the ethnic and cultural diversity they bring to their locale, is a real cause for concern.

AT the other end of the scale are Silicon Valley's newly-minted millionaires who are buying up vineyards and setting up their own wineries in the Napa Valley and Sonoma County wine regions to the north.

This, seemingly, is the thing to do among those who have too much cash and don't know what to do with it. Several nouveau proprietors and their wares were profiled last week in one of the local papers. Every single one had bought their winery with money from exercising their options. Not all were executives - one couple of former programmers had made good, working in the right place at the right time.

Never in history has so much wealth been generated in so short a time as in Silicon Valley. All of that makes the Valley a strange, wonderful and worrying place.

In the meantime, there's bad news if you're one of the ones that would like to end up in the Valley, chasing the American dream. The US has already filled its allotment of 115,000 high-tech visas - the so-called H-1B visa that let technology workers come into the country - six months before the end of the fiscal year. And future allotments are threatened by a political wrestling match to court Latino voters, which has stalled the Bill that would provide for more visas.

The whole issue is fraught. Older US technology workers say the tech companies just want fresh immigrant meat, workers up-to-date on new technologies whom they can pay less than senior programmers who need retraining.

Immigrants are trapped workers chained to their employers, argues a feature article in this month's Red Herring.

But the sun keeps right on shining for the elite at the top of the Silicon Valley pile.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie.

Salary Survey: www.mercurycen ter.com/svtech/companies/bossmakes/