Young and eccentric

The Oxford Dictionary defines eccentric as "odd or capricious in behaviour or appearance". That might very well describe many people who work in the Internet industry, in South Africa and worldwide. I thought that for this week`s piece, I`d give you a look behind the scenes, past the shiny exterior that Internet companies have started to present to the buying public, especially corporate customers who we assume are less tolerant to the quirks and oddities that they once used to cherish in high technology companies.

These days Bill Gates wears a ties and jackets, and SA Internet providers are following suit.

Anyone remember how Bill Gates was once the boy genius who looked as if he never took a shower or got a haircut, while everyone admired him silently for the incredible wealth he was creating? Well, these days Bill Gates wears a ties and jackets, and SA Internet providers are following suit, as it were. At least when faced with the "real world".

One of the oft-overlooked features of the Internet industry in South Africa is its relative youth. In some quarters, this is seen as a weakness; it`s interpreted as making Internet companies unfit to compete with more established IT or telecommunications firms due to the young age and "immaturity" of the staff who make the operations work. Though I haven`t actually checked this, I think the average age of employees where I work is about 26. Most people prefer to dress in denims and drive sporty cars, and their main areas of interest isn`t establishing families or buying houses. They are driven by something at once much baser and much more remarkable than money alone: most of them work in the Internet industry because it`s a paradigm that they truly believe will change the world.

Sound strange, perhaps a little too hippy for your liking? Well, me too, so let me try and calibrate this revelation for you. Most people I`ve ever met at ISPs have a healthy respect for the bottom line, at least in these sense that they believe their own bottom line is important enough to work hard and perform. Very young entrepreneurs, although the minority, are evident throughout the IT industry. Add to that the relatively vocal zeal of the Internet, and you`ve got a new kind of businessperson: a capitalist (in the best sense of the word) who believes in the potential of the technology to bring about a better world.

Unfortunately, not all of us can be as successful - and consequently affluent - as the very few who were lucky or shrewd enough to sell their start-ups at the right time and the right price. The majority of people who work at Internet providers are what one observer (in an American magazine on entrepreneurship called "Inc.") calls "the volunteer workforce". In their twenties or early thirties, highly educated and specialised in their knowledge, they work primarily for achievement and recognition of their skills, and for money only in a secondary sense.

However specialised their knowledge bases may be, though, they are also can-do generalists, often with backgrounds that are vastly different to what expectations would dictate: interestingly, the Internet industry doesn`t seem to have many vacancies for narrow-track computer science graduates. This is perhaps due to the fact that computer science departments at SA universities don`t typically teach much that`s of any practical use in the networking industry - the best network administrators are those who`ve learned to apply related skills and who are committed to designing, creating and maintaining the best possible network.

The network (or their servers) is what they`re dedicated to, fully and completely; pay cheques and cars are only a secondary feature. At some companies where I`ve been in the past, I`ve seen people work 18 hours every day for what amounts to a pittance because they truly loved what they did. Staff recongnition and remuneration, consequently, should be adjusted according to the type of person who works in this industry: the best companies are those with the best staff (truly, business relationships with partners, supplier, vendors as well as capital are not as important as the quality of your staff); and the best staff is hardly ever the higest-paid staff.

This is an important observation, and it`s hard to digest in two camps: in management, and at customer level. Customers, mostly, like dealing with suited and tied salespeople and also don`t object when techies pitch up to do an installation wearing at least a decent shirt and a tie. It`s hard to figure out exactly why that is, but I think it`s related to the customer`s relative inexperience with technical or Internet people. Especially in the financial sector, the expectation is still that you can`t be serious about doing business if you`re wearing jeans, even if your services are infinitely better than those of your Armani-wearing competitors.

Management`s concerns, on the other hand, are a little easier to understand. If your customers expect something from you, you make damn sure you provide it to them. Management in Internet companies has thus developed an interesting type of schizophrenia: there are those who are simply too hard-working and important, from an intellectual capital point of view, to let go, so they `hide` them away. As part of the operational back office at an ISP, nobody has to know that you wear torn t-shirts every day and don`t wash your hair very often. Or, for that matter, that you hold strong beliefs of some kind: in the Internet industry, we have stronger political and religious views than in any other industry I`ve ever come across. This is probably due to the extremely high levels of educational achievement coupled with the navel-gazing inwardness of those who are dedicated to spending way too much time with machines and cables.

It`s an eccentric industry, alright. Despite their checkered academic overachievement, almost missionary fervour and preference for casual clothes, the Internet industry`s people are the most diverse bunch imaginable. There are those, like me, who have backgrounds in the humanities or social sciences and who suddenly `saw the light` when they stumbled upon this amazing new environment that would make the world a smaller, better place. Or those for whom the limitless pontential of the Net meant breaking out of strict moulds in other segments of commerce or industry. Sadly for many Internet companies` management, these divergent interests and abilities are very difficult to rally together to provide well-defined services and products to customers who hardly have the time to get to know the individuals behind the email messages.

Working at Internet companies is consequently not friction-free. How could it be? Then again, I hear you think, which workplace is really ever friction-free? I don`t know if you`d call it "industrial relations" when most employees spend most of their time at desks in well-lit, well-ventilated rooms (and get as much free Coke as they can drink to boot), but there are always tensions in the high-tech industry. This is often due to the fact that techies and other key staffers are only too aware of the impending skills shortage in the SA IT sector and know that they can find other jobs, equally fulfilling, elsewhere. The economic law of demand and supply applies even in an environment where most people work because they love what they do and because they get to play with cool technology as part of the job. Knowing this makes people a little cocky.

Add to that the above-mentioned eccentricities, and you`ve got a truly interesting industry. How to resolve these crises? First of all, they are everywhere. I have a pretty solid industry-wide network of friends and acquaintances, and they all tell me the same thing: the grass is indeed no greener anywhere else. Everyone struggles with the same problem. Hoping that your employees will simply grow up over time probably won`t work as a remedy. Managing by giving them more toys and more money won`t make the basic inconsistencies go away. In the meantime, the customers have to deal with a bunch of people who - most of the time at least - seem as if they could care less. I have no real solution, but there`s your look behind the scenes.

Recognising the sheer dedication of these people to what they do and the technology they sell is probably a good first step in learning to deal with the Internet industry - don`t expect them to be like any other service industry; treat them on their own terms if at all possible. And there`s another thing that I really like about this industry: it`s enormously honest. If you think someone should wash their hair more often, tell them. They`ve probably just forgotten because they were working again until all hours last night configuring your router.