I did some contracting for Gateway about 11 or 12 years ago, commuting from KC to North Sioux City, SD for a week at a time, then coming back home for 2 weeks, for about a year. While Gateway (It was still Gateway 2000 back then) was known for being cut-throat in its wages, it seemed to be a pretty fun place to work, and the people I met were pretty happy working there. A couple of things I remember were BBQ lunches on Fridays during the good weather, with dollar burgers or brats, and a DJ under a big inflatable cow. And Ted had sponsored a couple of race cars, and he'd occasionally have them brought to the factory, and tear around the parking lot in them! That was about the time that Ted rejected a buy-out offer from Compaq, well before Compaq and HP merged.
Mark
When Lee was recruiting Nathaniel Borenstein, he offered to meet him for dinner. When Nathaniel arrived, he was escorted to the table. Lee asked if it was OK if Peter Frampton joined them for dinner. Lee was Peter's agent at the time. He was also Matthew Broderick's agent. It was common to have some of Lee's clients wander through. The producer for Dale Plant was a regular employee. He used his Hollywood music award trophy as a tie rack on his desk. The guy collapsed in the parking lot one morning. Too much alcohol and who knows what. We even had Crosby Loggins (Kenny Loggins's son) working on our phone bank. It was an odd place to work.
The place certainly had a typical 90s "party" atmosphere. It was a well financed startup. Working daily with Marshall Rose and Nathaniel Borenstein was really the highlight for me. The rest of it was window dressing and wretchedly long hours. I left the company and walked away from 38,000 options because the thousands of lines of code that I had to produce daily caused repetitive stress injuries to my hands, wrists and arms. The money would have been cold comfort next to the stinging tendons running through my hands and wrists. It was so bad that I was dropping glasses of water, unable to rotate a door knob and having serious problems shifting my car. The injuries didn't go away when I left, but my daily work responsibilities have been reduced enough to keep the RSI pain at bay. In the final analysis, the salary bump from working at FVHI is paying long term dividends that far exceed what I lost by walking away from the stock options.
A few of my fellow employees decided to "tough it out". One succumbed to MS as the stress triggered an "attack" that took her life. The lady who did our database work took over the tasks from the one with MS. She developed RSI problems so bad that she lost feeling in both hands. Many of us ended up at a doctor's office to treat the RSI problems. The company covered those costs (financial), but for many of us the treatment came too late. C'est la vie.