Amid the cubicles, between mock Bill Gates altars, Coke-can sculptures, bubble-wrap art, and dangling detritus, hangs a series of posters that plead, "Who is the best person you've ever worked with? How can we hire him/her?"
The official wall art exemplifies a paradox at the core of Netscape's culture: Silicon Valley's bootstrapping start-up darling of just a few years ago now boasts a staff of 2,400 engineers, suits, PR execs, Web gurus, and "mozillionaires." Netscape is grabbing every young and hungry intern, contractor, and college grad it can swallow while slowly growing into a Silicon Valley Goliath.
"We created a lot of hype around start-ups, and we're suffering because we're not a start-up anymore," says Bob Sundstrom, a "diversity specialist" at Netscape. "It's harder to find qualified candidates these days."
Silicon Valley in general is suffering from a dearth of talent. The technology industry is growing at a breakneck pace, a new, promising start-up launches every day, and there just aren't enough workers to go around. Computer science majors are down 43 percent since 1986, and Netscape has mushrooming competition for fresh young blood. It has even resorted to paying employees rewards up to US$2,000 for each referral they bring in that gets hired.
To maintain its appeal, Netscape is working hard to preserve its young, hip atmosphere, offering all the typical benefits of a wealthy young company. The Mo'z Cafe offers dirt-cheap pan-seared tuna; office kitchens feature free sodas and espresso; weekly beer bashes (officially termed "receptions") invite the whole staff; and a leisure-friendly management encourages employees to start hockey leagues, bring in their pet snakes, and set up koosh-basketball hoops. Even nicer perks include extraneous services: Les Concierges will arrange social engagements and buy gifts for employees too busy to do it themselves; a car-detailing service and dentist van lurk in the parking lot; there's dry cleaning pick-up on site; and a hot tub is hidden away in the engineering quad.
Come West, young'uns
But most of all, Netscape is pushing the enticement of youth.
Its goal is to find 20 percent of its staff among recent college graduates. As Sundstrom puts it, "We really value the open mind and creativity of college students. Our company was built on that, in a college lab." In order to reach the goal, Netscape began an aggressive recruiting campaign, hitting 25 crême de la crême campuses last year, including UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon.
Netscape pushes a cushy internship program: More than 100 interns are currently being coddled, invited to top meetings, and given responsibilities beyond the file-and-lick-envelopes duties of the average summer job. One intern, Reaz Hoque, was discovered by Marc Andreessen via his online writings about JavaScript and given a job as a summer technology evangelist, preaching about Netscape at conferences like DefCon. Other interns write code and handle media relations. Interns are invited to parties at Jim Barksdale's house, throw their own Friday beer bashes, and are paid "extremely well," as one intern puts it.
The coddling seems to be working - engineering intern Ross Fubini has come back for a second summer, and plans to apply for a full-time job upon graduation. As he says, "I want a start-up environment and recognized that the kind of technology I wanted to work with requires aspects of a big company. It's like a plane that's flying and you're trying to build the wings at the same time."
But despite Fubini's view, Netscape's "global talent seeker" David Bizer agrees that many perceive Netscape's "bigness" as a drawback, and that as a non-start-up it's losing potential recruits to the craze it started when the company turned its earliest employees into "mozillionaires." As Kathleen Stanton, a high-tech adviser at UC Berkeley's career center says, "There was a time when students wanted the big companies, but they want small companies now. They like start-ups because they get to do more varied work, they learn faster, and they can maybe get rich."
As the pool of CS majors shrinks, Netscape is also drawing on a not-so-young but equally talented population of local contractors. Approximately 100 contractors work at Netscape at any given time, making it a landing place for many Silicon Valley technology grunts. Netscape pulls them in for their "expertise," one HR person says, occasionally even putting them in charge of projects. And in the case of contractors, those "Who is the best person you ever worked with?" posters seem to work.
"Netscape attracts the people it does because a lot of the full-timers there play in so many different social circles," says Jim Hart, a former Netscape contractor. "I get the gigs I do because my friends know I'm good at what I do, and have work they need done. I wouldn't have worked at Netscape if I didn't know a handful of people that worked there. I think that's a really big factor in the number of good people they manage to bring in."
But while some contractors come in on the hopes of getting a full-time job, others aren't as eager to stay on, preferring to get the prestige of Netscape on their resumes without committing long-term to extended work hours on often stressful projects. Now that its share prices are no longer rocketing, stock options aren't the enticement they used to be. And take-home pay for contractors is often better than salaried employees - as much as $60 per hour for work weeks that can clock as high as 70 hours.
Exploiting the Netscape cachet
While many employees remain rabidly enthusiastic, even some of those made rich by the Netscape IPO are starting to leave for other opportunities.
"For the first time it's becoming easier to recruit people out of Netscape, primarily because it's starting to get a big company feel to it. There are certainly people at Netscape willing to look at other possibilities," says Margaret King, vice president of the Christian & Timbers recruiting firm. "Having said that, 90 percent would want to go there and 10 percent would want to get out, so it's not like there's an influx of departures."
Perhaps what Netscape has going for it most of all is its own employees - full-timers, interns, former contractors, and recruiters all agree on the "brilliance" of the people who work at Netscape, citing it as the Number One reason they want to work there. And Netscape is still the most recognizable of the new-media companies, its name synonymous with the excitement of the Web itself and the developing technologies propelling it.
"The name, the cachet of working at Netscape - it's really true," says Donna Sokolsky, manager of extranet marketing at Netscape. "Netscape was the hottest thing ... and I do still think it is. There are other start-ups, and we started the start-up mania, but it's still about being at the front of the fastest-growing media right now."
Special Report Coverage:
Part 1: Netscape Sheds Its Baby Skin
Part 2: Building the Networked Enterprise
Part 3: Not-So-Open Standards
Part 4: Playing Politics
Part 5: Netscape Work Culture
