For me, more than any other sign of how smooth the IPO transaction has become is the culture clash that didn't happen between high tech and high finance. It used to be that these scruffy-bearded, sandal-wearing engineers would ride in their VW vans up to San Francisco, where they would take the elevator up into the world of summer-worsted pinstripes and gel-slicked hair.

Now the engineers follow the stock market closely, and half of them hold puts and calls on tech indexes. Every third sentence out of an engineer's mouth these days uses the phrase "value proposition." The investment bankers rarely wear anything fancier than polo shirts over khakis, and they can talk for hours about developing object-oriented software on the Solaris 2.4 platform versus Windows NT 3.51. The subcultures are gone.

I walk into a conference room and I cannot tell which are the bankers, which are the lawyers, and which are the entrepreneurs. High tech and high finance haven't met halfway, it's more that they've both gone all the way. It's not a culture clash, it's a culture mash.

[...] Their laid-back appearance is mirrored in their dialect; their favorite adjectives are "foo," "large-N," and "blah." They can add a "y" to the end of just about any word that passes over their tongue, and for added emphasis throw in as a prefix "super-", "turbo-," or "giga-". So while Steve and John throw out market-savvy terms like "viral marketing," "CPMs," and "weight-average ratchet clauses," Kevin and Max get a dismissive laugh out of that "turbobusinessy" talk. Kevin calls the whole Internet startup-thing "the lottery wheel."

Kevin had taught me about the second key overview concept of Java programming, "Not Caring." The less a building block of code has to care about what other blocks of code are up to, the less likely the bubble-gum bubble will burst. Code that "slopped" was code that was too interdependent, code that made the mistake of caring.

[...] Max said that writing such a program was "a piece of cheese." When Arie heard that, he didn't know what Max meant. Did "a piece of cheese" mean it was easy, like the phrase "a piece of cake," or did it mean something stinky, meaning the simulation would be a rotten program?

[...] They're all business development VPs for one Web site or another or marketing directors or PR flakes or CEOs -- and they all have graduate degrees and come from good schools and used to work in management consulting. They're not all blond and blue-eyed but that's the dominant strain. They all have firm handshakes and can look you in the eye and have big plans to go away on the weekend and aren't absent-minded and know to come out with a laugh when the conversational gambit is mean to provoke one. It's like the Valley crowed was given an en masse Cosmo makeover, given "that MBA look," gentrified just in time for the big Silicon Valley dramatizations and book deals. I looked at the scene, and I thought about how NBC bought into the company, and then it hit me: the party looked like a scene from Friends. As if every actor who hadn't made the cut had been given a job in the Internet division.

This is the cultural scene of late 1998. Programming used to be the bread and butter of high tech, but the in crowd now prefers chapati to bread and creme fraiche to butter. It's all about synergy deals and branding and national advertising.

Max confided how he had been confronting his issues about commitment. He had thought that his freelance status was a way of keeping his priorities straight and protecting himself. He had outrageous fun and brain-candy work, what more could a young guy want? But now he was reseeing it as a lack of attachment in every direction: no job, no kids, no marriage, no love. Did owning a portion of a house and volunteering for a San Mateo Big Brother program count as commitment? His freelance contracts explicitly stated, "Either party may terminate this relationship at any time." "I consider these things and wonder, have I found new and valid lifestyle alternatives, or am I simply a coward?"

Steve Sellers uses this chance to tell everyone on his team that TEN, their dreaded powerhouse rival now backed by Kleiner Perkins, moved into on-line card games by buying a small company called Webdeck, which was just one ex-Oracle programmer working out of his garage. Just one guy! Not so long ago this all-important revenue producer for TEN was a lot smaller than the Big Network. So no thinking, We can't do this. NO thinking, What are we doing playing with the big boys?

[...] Their product is basically 98 percent done. To a salesperson accustomed to selling vapor, 98 percent done is 100 percent salable. But engineers are perfectionists, and to them salable is a far cry from shippable. This is the X axis of the psychic space that divides engineers from salespeople: technical elegance versus pragmatic compromise.

[...] Selling is all about listening. Listening is a euphemism for keeping your trap shut. When you walk into an account, what you're asking for, at the very least, is a meeting -- which better go well. Customers' satisfaction with a meeting will be directly correlated to how much they get to speak. (It is the tendency to interrupt that hinders engineers who try to sell. Even when they try to listen, engineers-turned-salesman give in to the irresistible desire to impress the client with their brainiac ability to anticipate needs through logical deduction rather than allow clients to spell out their needs for themselves.

Yaresuses a highly empathic conversational method that is much like echoing or mirroring. He merely repeats the essence of what he hears, resisting all temptation to ask leading questions. The dialogue that ensues sounds more like marital conflict counseling than a sales call. Yares often ends up moderating the bureaucratic grudges between technical engineers and their department managers.

[...] Engineers are notoriously too fast with the solution to the customer's problem. They don't show empathy. Making the problem seem too easy to fix is to make the customer feel stupid for not having fixed it earlier.