Steve Sellers and John Hanke were pinching themselves as they drove from Berkeley to San Mateo on that October evening. "It was like we turned the light switch on," Steve said.

Sellers' and Hanke's The Big Network was a year-old game site where Internet users can play simple board games like chess and card games like poker against other users. No sooner had they started putting feelers out about their transition to Java than, suddenly, it was happening. Suddenly, every big Web site had decided they wanted to offer their users simple board games. Yahoo had bought one company, Classic Games, and Excite had arranged a licensing deal with another game provider, TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. Infoseek and Netscape's Netcenter followed Excite's suit. Steve Sellers got a hold of a producer at Snap, the fastest growing search directory on the Web, who stepped up and offered The Big Network a contract.

There was only one problem ...

Snap's representative, Dan Burkhart, had come to The Big Network's tiny little underground virtual office in Berkeley, and Dan had to ask -- where were the programmers?

Steve and John hemmed and hawed, not wanting to quite admit they were a virtual company, and then Dan Burkhart asked, "Well, are they employees, or are they just freelancers?" Snap wasn't going to do business with a rag-tag company that couldn't handle the volume of its millions of users. John Hanke had drawn up a schedule, and on his calendar he wrote the necessary milestones in a red pen. Then he had scrawled a big green "X" on November 16th, launch day. Now that he had committed to this date, the Big Green X loomed heavily.

"Well, they're under contract," John Hanke said. Freelancers, but with some guarantees on availability.

So Dan asked the next logical question. "Do they have a stake in the outcome? Do they hold options?" Then he stated the point more directly. "How do we know they're going to still be here next month?"

"Oh, that's no problem," John Hanke assured him.

"We've got a great relationship with these guys," added Steve Sellers. "We've known them for a couple years." This wasn't quite true.

John and Steve managed to get through the meeting without blinking, but as soon as it was over they got in the car and were driving from Berkeley to Belmont, just south of San Mateo.

The Big Network did have five low-cost freelance programmers who had brought the company this far. In addition, Steve Sellers' younger brother Mike, who was the company's creative director, could help out in a pinch. The company's chief technology officer, Arie Grossman, could handle site integration. John Hanke's plan -- ever intent on saving money -- was to fall back on that low-cost B-team with the code that wasn't mission critical. For the code that was, they would go out and hire the best programmer they had ever known, Kevin Hester.

Sellers had known Kevin since they had both worked at 3DO together. Steve never would have considered getting into the Snap deal if not for Kevin being between projects right now and available. A housemate of Kevin's, Mark "Max" Maxham, had just recently started doing some piecemeal work for The Big Network. He was proving to be just as studly as Kevin.

If by chance you've read "The Soul of a New Machine," or any of its descendant reportings on deadline development, you know how this "signing up" session is supposed to go. The manager says to the programmer, "It will be hard work, thankless hours for not a lot of pay. But it's the cutting edge -- you'll have to figure out how to surpass the technology of our competitors. It's a job for only the best." And the programmer can't resist a duel, wants to prove he's one of the best, so he signs on. For pride. For the intellectual challenge.

That was the old way of working with programmers.

But, uh ... the world's a little different now.

Top programmers are not nerds stuck in the back room anymore. They lead wildly imaginative lives. Kevin and Max are both pilots. One Saturday, they held a plane party on the tarmac at the San Mateo Airport -- just bring $15 to cover the gas for an hour. Another thing they did was buy an old Wonder Bread delivery truck and repaint it in pastel colors as the "Freezing Man" truck, which they equipped with massive freezer units and drove around the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert, handing out ice cream sandwiches and Creamsicles to people in the 100-degree heat.

Kevin and Max live in a place they call "Geekhaus," a five-bedroom, split-level ranch home overlooking the Sugarloaf Mountain preserve in Belmont. Every bedroom of the house looks to have been decorated by an earthquake -- clothes, books, sporting goods strewn on the floor. The occupants seem not quite to have gotten the concept that certain things, such as artwork, can be hung from the walls rather than just leaned against them.

Max wears baggy blue jeans, a baggy faded blue t-shirt, and sport sandals. His fingernails are excessively short, all in the pink; his fingertips swell up beyond the nail's end. Max is pale-skinned with faint freckles everywhere, and his hair, which used to drape on his shoulders, has been buzzed off at one-quarter inch. There are two thin hoop earrings in his left ear. He's the same age as Kevin, 30; they've known each other since they were 14 and growing up in Dallas, two young nerds who met online.

Kevin scuffles around the house in stone-washed loose-fitting shorts, Teva sport sandals, and a black Shiner Bock ("go Texas!") T-shirt. He is 6 feet 1 with precious little meat on his bones, a pale almond skin with peach fuzz on his cheeks and dishwater blond hair that is accented, in back, with a stringy ponytail dyed purple and aqua. He has a face of beauty, kind pale blue eyes, and a gemstone earring of the same color. 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 "weighted-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."

Here is what you need to know about Kevin, which says a lot about the plight of programmers and what they struggle with today. Kevin is, by all accounts, a programmer's programmer, an |ber-geek. Studly engineers are always attracted to working with other studly engineers, and Kevin is a studly-engineer magnet. If you're lucky enough to know Kevin, you are tapped in to a wide network of talented programmers who respect him.

In an economy like this, a guy like that should be fabulously rich, right?

Not necessarily. Two examples. Back when he was employed at 3DO, Kevin did some freelance work for a few friends at a startup called Artemis Research. They were called Artemis Research only because the fitness studio which used to inhabit the building on Alma Street in Palo Alto had left a metal sculpture of an archer bolted to the brick exterior. They begged Kevin to join the company as employee number 7. He thought what they were doing was whizzy, but Trip Hawkins at 3DO convinced him that the future at 3DO was even brighter. Working at 3DO had always been "insanely fun," and Trip promised more. 3DO's stock was at 12. In the following year, it dropped to 3. Meanwhile, Artemis Research changed its name to WebTV and sold itself to Microsoft for $350 million.

You come out of a situation like that not knowing who to trust, who's "word" to take, who to work for. So you rack your brain looking for a livable solution -- is it freelance at a high hourly rate, fuck the options? Do you just focus on lifestyle and ignore the security a big payday would bring? Do you pore over Red Herring and Upside, hoping to kick-start a business savvy? Do you restrict yourself to working for managers whose companionship you enjoy?

This kind of thing, being so close to stardom without knowing it, happens to Kevin all the time. The famous story about Kevin is this friendship he struck up with another pilot at the Palo Alto Airport, back when Kevin and Max owned a fabric-covered, 1960-model Piper Colt, and M-W-F mornings at 7:30 a.m. Kevin would go earn his instrument ratings. On those cold mornings when Kevin had to wipe the frost off his wings, he would look with a little envy at this other pilot who kept his fancy Malibu in a dry hangar. They struck up a friendship, talking strictly about planes, and all Kevin ever knew about this middle-aged guy was that he had retired from pro football. The guy had told him his name, but it meant nada to Kevin.

But one day, a cute girl at the office was talking about football, and Kevin offered up that he knew an ex-49er. Who? she asked. "Jeff somebody," Kevin responded. She was trying to think of a retired 49er named Jeff, but couldn't come up with names. "His last name was Montana," Kevin said. "That's it. Jeff Montana. Good buddy of mine."

Let's call this dilemma that good programmers face "The ABCDEFG Problem." I call it that because all good programmers have tons of choices to work on, A through G. Some choices seem cooler and some seem dumber, some possible and some improbable, but as to the payday lurking behind the door, they all look alike. They're just A through G, take your pick. Choice A may be 3DO, and choice G may be $2 million of Microsoft stock, and Choice C may be a quarterback with four Super Bowl rings, but you just don't know. It's sort of like choosing one million units of foreign currency by which country's paper bills have the splashiest colors, or making a million-dollar bet on the NCAA basketball tournament by whichever team has the sexiest cheerleaders. The variables that programmers have to go on (A-G) are not the variables that determine the outcome (X, Y, and Z).

So when Steve Sellers and John Hanke sat down on the couch in the Geekhaus living room, Kevin and Max had the ABCDEFG Problem in the back of their minds.

Hanke tried to explain the situation. They had just signed a big deal on a project that would go live in a month. It would require a lot of programming to rebuild the system. A true challenge and all that. "Soul of a New Machine" stuff. The Big Network didn't have a lot of cash, and so they wanted to offer Kevin and Max options on a share of the company.

"Oh, no thanks," Kevin said.

"Not for me," Max echoed.

John didn't want to tell these programmers too much, for fear they might go right to Snap and charge more money for the work. But at the same time, he had to get across that this is a real opportunity. "It would be in your best interest," John tried. "It's with a very major player. If it flies, our company will become very valuable, very quickly."

But Kevin and Max had their own secrets too; they really didn't even want to tell Steven and John how they had been burned by options so many times before.

"We want you to be properly incentivized," Steve urged.

"We're happy to work at our hourly rates," they responded.

"Well, at least can we put you under a contract to guarantee us a certain number of hours?" John was aware that Kevin and Max were working for several other companies at the same time.

"I can help you for a little while," Kevin said. "I'll do the architecture. But from then on, it's more of a job for Max." Kevin is one of the rare engineers in the valley who is really, really good at what is called "hardware bring-ups," the nether place where hardware and software meet. Most hardware guys have electrical engineering backgrounds, and don't understand the importance of scalability. Kevin, who has a computer science background, can design a software system in sync with the hardware servers to be the Big Network's backbone.

Being a freelancer was hard for him -- he was so in demand that he constantly had to say "no" to people and projects he'd come to like. This angst tore him up. And whenever he wasn't working, he was thinking about how much money he could be making -- how the opportunity cost of goofing off was $110 an hour. That was no way to live.

Kevin believed he had just solved the ABCDEFG Problem by taking a job at a reduced salary of $140,000 and working only 4 days a week. On Fridays, he rolls out of bed and scampers across the hallway to the Geekhaus garage, where Kevin is building his ultimate hack, an ultralight Dragonfly kit-assembly airplane. When he's done, he plans to sell Geekhaus and fly off to Geeksville, a friend's concept commune somewhere north, probably around Boonville, where they can live together and telecommute. When he needs to have meetings in the Valley, Kevin is just an hour away in the Dragonfly.

Max, though, was perfectly content being a freelancer. The longer he goes without a regular job, the less he wants one. He calls offices "cube farms." He has the opposite mind-set as Kevin. He knew that if he worked full-time, he could rake in $150,000 a year. But he only needs a certain amount to live on every month, and at his hourly rate he knows how many hours he has to work each week: 18. With all the money he's hauling in as Contractor Boy, Max hired a "personal assistant," a friend named Chaya, at $15 an hour. She repainted the Geekhaus's kitchen an avocado color. She's sewing him a Willy Wonka costume for Halloween. He "commissioned" her to make two turbosized bean bag chairs for the downstairs rec room, each the size of a baby hippopotamus. His life now is "pretty zippy."

What thrilled Max here was not the options, but the sure-fire contract to go live on the Big Green X -- that his code would be out there for all to see, and soon. For a programmer, worse even than owning worthless options is the humiliation of having built great software that still sits in some dark closet, never implemented. By 1998, every programmer with a few years of experience knew the humiliation of "going dark," and it's become a bigger factor in how they decide The ABCDEFG Problem. Max says he has a "priority knob" that he can turn up at times. He was willing to turn it up for this opportunity, except ...

"Don't forget I'm going on vacation in 10 days," he said. He'd been very up front about his vacation all along. This was no surprise.

"Can you reschedule it?" John asked.

"We'll make it worth your while," Steve tried. There was so much Steve wanted to tell Max. He wanted to tell him how NBC had bought two huge chunks of Snap from CNET, and how NBC had hired Saatchi & Saatchi to create a big advertising campaign for Snap to appear during the American League Championships, when 60 million Americans would be tuning in to watch the New York Yankees destroy the Cleveland Indians. He wanted to convey to Max that this was no ordinary opportunity here. This was a chance to secure his future. Surely, that was worth postponing a vacation.

"My vacation is inviolable," Max insisted.

"Come on ... "

"No. I won't reschedule."

"You must be going somewhere very important," John remarked.

Max wasn't even sure he wanted to tell them. Max was learning to draw borders in his life. He was not going to get overinvolved here. Max has never even been to The Big Network's offices.

Max dropped the bomb on Steve and John. Max's cousin had a friend who had 400 acres of land with nothing on it but the kind of vegetation that attracts deer, ducks, rabbits and squirrels. "I'm going to Tennessee to go squirrel hunting with my cousin."

Squirrel hunting! Oh my! If there was ever a moment that signaled how the world had changed -- a moment that signaled who was in power here -- this was it! This is not 1993 any more, when game coders working on deadline were barked at, driven to exhaustion and underpaid. This is 1998, and it's the era of the Internet, which has squared the complexity of programming, causing a paradigm shift in the market for talented coders. Never before have the few good ones had so much leverage. Talent! They are the talent, and it is their schedule we will adhere to.

My brother and I are going squirrel hunting! A week in the mountains!

Hell, yes! The only time of the year to hunt squirrels is when the first chilly evenings of autumn scare those squirrels into panic mode, and those squirrels get so focused on their nut-cutting that they don't notice humans with shotguns marching through the grove in camouflage suits. It's also mating time, and the male squirrels let out a little mating bark for the females, giving up their position. So tell that to Snap!

Steve Sellers and John Hanke were at a loss. "You're leaving us hanging here ..." they said to Max. Even though Max would be around much of the time, his absence in the middle meant he couldn't be the Go-To guy.

Max's friend Jason Tobias had been looking for a freelance project on which to work. Max said they could look Jason up and talk to him.

"Is he good?" Steve asked of Kevin, trusting his old friend's judgment.

"He's studly," Kevin said.

"I'll look him up," John said. "I'd like to get him involved right away."