Do you think Eric Swanson is happy?  Compare your personal philosophical conception of happiness to the lifestyle of Eric Swanson by critically evaluating some of the philosophical conceptions of the good life discussed in class and the text book.  (See article below; paper guidelines provided in class.)

                Extreme Measures: In the Race to Build A Fiber-Optic Switch, The Winners Take All
                   ---
             But `Project Orange' Yields Some Bitter Fruit, Too; Mr. Swanson's Sacrifices
                   ---
                 `Computers Are Your God'   By Jon G. Auerbach
 
                   07/19/2000
                   The Wall Street Journal
 
                   (Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) 

                   CHELMSFORD, Mass. -- Eric Swanson stands nervously in the
                   customs line at Boston's Logan Airport, holding a brown paper bag.
                   Inside are 10 tiny, powerful German lasers.

                   For safety reasons, importing the devices requires special approval from
                   the Food and Drug Administration. But Mr. Swanson's company,
                   Sycamore Networks Inc., doesn't have that approval. Nor, as far as Mr.
                   Swanson is concerned, does the company have time to get it: The lasers
                   are critical in the creation of Sycamore's fiber-optic switch, an oversize
                   computer that routes beams of light across broadband networks.

                   Mr. Swanson's heart is racing as an officer asks what he has in the bag.

                   "Just lasers," Mr. Swanson stammers before being waved through.

                   Importing unauthorized goods is just one extreme to which Mr. Swanson
                   has found himself willing to go in the race to design a workable switch for
                   the company that he helped found. Although Sycamore began building its
                   product after almost all of its competitors -- titans including Cisco
                   Systems Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. -- its risk-taking has helped
                   Sycamore beat most of those rivals to market. Two weeks ago,
                   360networks Inc., a Canadian company aiming to build a global
                   fiber-optic network, placed an order for as much as $420 million of
                   Sycamore gear, including the new switch. While Sycamore didn't give a
                   duration for the contract, it is one of the largest to date involving optical
                   switches.

                   Producing the device in only 14 frenetic months, though, has taken a huge
                   toll, both professional and personal, on Mr. Swanson and his colleagues
                   in "Project Orange." After more than a year of long days and weekends
                   spent under the fluorescent lights of Sycamore's labs, the 20-odd men
                   and women of the Orange project have grown grayer, balder and
                   heavier. Exercise and hobbies, for many, are a thing of the past. Family
                   lives are strained, as spouses and children fail to comprehend why
                   building a better box requires missing so many school assemblies, teacher
                   conferences and weekends at home.

                   Broadband, wireless, fiber optics -- the territory is all about colossal
                   promise and make-or-break glitches. Annual spending on fiber-optic
                   networking gear will reach between $7 billion and $10 billion by 2004,
                   up from about $400 million this year, according to industry estimates.
                   Telephone carriers including AT&T Corp., Williams Communications
                   Group Inc. and Sprint Corp. have already spent $200 billion building a
                   transcontinental network to carry oceans of data at blazing speed.

                   In theory, this network makes possible an Internet without delays and
                   universal phone service on the Web. But there's one problem: The
                   connections stink. The vaunted fiber-optic network is like a railroad with
                   no centralized method for switching trains. Traffic moves well below
                   capacity, with carriers forced to dispatch crews to points along the line to
                   reprogram routes, much like conductors throwing train switches after
                   making sure the coast is clear. Since data are pulsed along as light, not
                   electricity, fiber requires a whole new kind of switching technology,
                   presenting one of the greatest business opportunities of the New
                   Economy.

                   Double-Time

                   Specifications call for Sycamore's switch -- the SN 16000 -- to
                   simultaneously process the equivalent of more than two million phone
                   calls, more than twice the capabilities of most existing devices. But its
                   breakthrough feat would be its ability to monitor the lines, automatically
                   rerouting data along the shortest available path.

                   When Sycamore began building the SN 16000 in April 1999, the
                   company was just a year old. Rivals including Cisco and Ciena Corp.
                   were months into developing their own switches. Though its competitors
                   have more resources, Sycamore has a technology pedigree from the
                   Massachusetts Institute of Technology's prestigious Lincoln Labs and has
                   recruited dozens of engineers from Cascade Communications, a premier
                   equipment maker in the mid-1990s. Sycamore's chairman and its chief
                   executive both came from Cascade.

                   That family tree has helped make Sycamore one of the hottest companies
                   in the fiber-optic world. As Internet use explodes, stretching existing
                   networks, investor eyes are focused on any company in fiber optics.
                   Partly because of the track record of Sycamore's management team, the
                   company's stock market value is roughly $35 billion.

                   Sycamore has had a rocket-ship ride as a new stock since going public
                   last year. That has made a wealthy man of the 39-year-old Mr. Swanson,
                   a former MIT scientist. His 2.5 million Sycamore options are worth about
                   $350 million. But there has been a personal cost. Mr. Swanson has been
                   working 15-hour days for months as lead optical engineer on Project
                   Orange. For days at a time, he gets almost no sleep. His life is full of
                   tension, pushing his team to the point of exhaustion, and straining his
                   family life. His eyes sport heavy bags. His skin is the color of
                   marshmallow.

                   Stripped Away

                   Each morning, Mr. Swanson awakens at 6:45. While he showers, his
                   wife Lynne lays out his clothes and then prepares a glass of juice and a
                   slice of toast, which he grabs on his way out the door. She prepares a
                   lunch box and makes sure there is gas in his car.

                   With no time on his hands for current events or outside reading, let alone
                   the basketball or scuba diving that he once loved, Mr. Swanson has
                   gradually stripped everything but work from his life.

                   Ms. Swanson reads weekly magazines for her husband, condenses
                   important news into two-minute synopses, and reads them to him when
                   he arrives home each evening, usually after 10 p.m. She handles all the
                   couple's finances, the children's lives, and repairs at their home outside
                   Boston.

                   Mr. Swanson's withering pace is no isolated event. At a companywide
                   engineering meeting, Sycamore managers put together a tongue-in-cheek
                   slide show listing the top 10 signs of a Sycamore employee. They
                   included "Their spouse has their picture put on a milk carton" and "Their
                   kids call them `Uncle Daddy.' "

                   When the slides were shown, the laughter from some of the engineers
                   rang hollow.

                   Part of the strength of the Sycamore switch lies in its state-of-the-art
                   components. The company has worked closely with suppliers: Sycamore
                   benefits by getting early access to products; the suppliers get Sycamore's
                   expertise in designing them. But the approach means more work for Mr.
                   Swanson and managers who work with the suppliers. Promises aren't
                   always kept, and complications are common.

                   Sycamore approached Infineon AG, a German laser firm, early on with
                   the idea of doubling the speed of its current lasers from 1.25 billion bits
                   per second to 2.5 billion bits. The devices, called vertical cavity
                   surface-emitting lasers, referred to as "vixels," are used to convert
                   electrical signals back into light inside the switch. They were critical to
                   making Sycamore's switch smaller (by doubling the speed of the lasers,
                   Sycamore needed only half the number), and more efficient.

                   Throughout last summer, Infineon's sales representative promised
                   Sycamore that the faster lasers would be finished on time, by early fall.
                   Then Mr. Swanson received an ominous e-mail from the representative,
                   hinting that Infineon might not even be able to build the faster laser, citing
                   vague "technical risks."

                   Mr. Swanson and his colleagues wrote up a list of more than 50 hurdles
                   that Infineon would have to clear if it wanted to keep the business. Those
                   items included daily conference calls and regular progress reports. In
                   effect, Sycamore was taking control of the project. The program
                   culminated in Mr. Swanson's trip to Berlin to pick up the faster lasers. By
                   bringing them back to the U.S., team Orange was able to use the first
                   batch of lasers in a prototype. Mr. Swanson's move kept the switch
                   project on schedule.

                   As pressures have increased at Sycamore, Mr. Swanson has managed to
                   contain his tension. He never raises his voice and often plays the role of
                   mediator within the company. Many of Sycamore's engineers look up to
                   him as a role model. At home, however, Mr. Swanson has become more
                   demanding and irritable. He often loses his temper with Ms. Swanson
                   because he considers their house too cluttered. He complains that their
                   closets are too full of clothes. He grew irate on discovering three rakes in
                   the garage, which he considered excessive. One night, he returned home
                   late from work and was upset because the family pool sticks were not
                   properly lined up from shortest to longest.

                   Last fall, Mr. Swanson was so busy at work he neglected to buy an
                   anniversary present. His wife reminded him.

                   "What do you want, a few million dollars?" he asked.

                   "How about just a card?" she replied.

                   Mr. Swanson says he was only joking, but admits he has been consumed
                   with his work. He acknowledges being overbearing about cleanliness and
                   clutter. "She's right, I'm wrong," he says.

                   In an episode he now regrets, he arrived home one night during a
                   rainstorm in March to discover the gutters had not been cleaned -- and
                   promptly ordered Ms. Swanson outside at 11 p.m. to climb a ladder and
                   unclog them.

                   Ms. Swanson says she hopes her husband's unreasonable behavior will
                   end when Project Orange is over. "He wants to control everything," she
                   says. "And it's gotten much worse since he's been at Sycamore."

                   Heating Up

                   March 2000: Aldo D'Amico and his Project Orange hardware engineers
                   are looking grim. In testing, Charles Landino, who specializes in power
                   supplies, discovers that the SN 16000's primary and backup fans are
                   both on the fritz. The switch is heating up to more than 212 degrees --
                   more than 70 degrees above optimal levels.

                   The switch may fail, but at least "you can cook a pizza on top of the box,"
                   quips Jay Frances, one Orange member. Mr. D'Amico isn't laughing. He
                   reminds the crew that AT&T is scheduled to visit Sycamore the next
                   week.

                   Mr. Landino discovers that the built-in fuses that regulate the fans aren't
                   large enough. The fix isn't difficult, but test switches with weak fuses have
                   already been shipped to Williams Communications in Tulsa, Okla., and
                   Iaxis BV, a London-based fiber-optic provider. Sycamore's rival, Ciena,
                   already has its switch with Iaxis labs, and Sycamore needs to get its foot
                   in the door. The team decides to immediately ship new fan devices to the
                   customers. Luckily, the problems go undetected.

                   By late March, the Orange team is preparing for an April visit by AT&T,
                   which has finally yielded to entreaties by Daniel Smith, the Sycamore
                   CEO, to have a look at the switch. Rumors have been flying around
                   Sycamore that Tellium, a closely held start-up, already has its switch in
                   AT&T's New Jersey labs. Cisco Systems is also said to have a head
                   start.

                   Sycamore sales representatives have assured AT&T that the SN 16000
                   will be able to automatically detect problems, such as breaks in the fiber
                   lines, and be able to re-route traffic to alternative lines in about half a
                   second. The re-route time is crucial to AT&T because line breaks are
                   routine on a massive network -- caused by such things as sloppy digging
                   on a sewer line, say -- and every moment lost before rerouting means a
                   snippet of voice or other data transmission is lost. Beyond a certain length
                   of interruption, customers begin to complain. AT&T has been clear that it
                   wants the re-route time no slower than the half-second Sycamore has
                   promised.

                   But when a group of AT&T engineers were in Chelmsford for a
                   preliminary evaluation, Sycamore engineers disclosed that they had not
                   been able to get the re-route speed of the SN 16000 below a second.
                   Over dinner one night, Mr. Swanson asked one of the AT&T engineers
                   what the most important quality the phone giant looks for a supplier.

                   "One we can trust," he says the engineer responded. Mr. Swanson took
                   the comment as a warning.

                   The Bake-Off Approaches

                   In a bid to shorten the re-route time before the full-scale April visit --
                   which everyone at Sycamore starts calling the "bake-off" -- Mr. Swanson
                   instructs the Orange team to write a new set of complex software that
                   would trigger alarms each time a communications problem is detected.
                   This is far more complicated than the original software design, which
                   involved using a sort of beacon that sent out a signal every second to
                   determine if there were any fiber problems.

                   The task is the responsibility of Arvind Puntambekar and his team of
                   software engineers. But Mr. Swanson is worried about Mr.
                   Puntambekar, a wiry man with a head of wild hair, who also seems to be
                   suffering from stress. The engineer is rarely home with his wife and two
                   daughters. Mr. Swanson fears Mr. Puntambekar is beginning to buckle
                   under work and family pressure.

                   As the redesign begins, Mr. Puntambekar's 14-year-old daughter Nisha,
                   sends him an e-mail:

                   "For the past few days, I've been making observations, and reaching
                   conclusions about Sycamore Networks' engineers/employees. You
                   people have no contact, whatsoever with the real world! WHAT'S YOU
                   PEOPLE'S PROBLEM?? . . . You're all living like MONKS in that
                   building. You shut yourselves in your little cubicles, and for 12-16 hours
                   all you do is sit and stare at computer screens. WHATSAMATTA?!
                   You're exactly like monks, except you dedicate your lives to working and
                   computers instead of God. Actually computers are your god. They
                   provide you with comfort, fairness, entertainment, etc. Y'all need serious
                   help, and FAST!! Since I'm a well-educated teen, I'm going to tell you
                   how to save your pitiful lives. . . . Step away from the computers."

                   Closing by saying "that's all the time I have," Nisha questions whether her
                   father and his colleagues are "brave enough" to accept her prescription.
                   She signs, "Nisha (the older daughter of Arvind with the long last name)."

                   Mr. Puntambekar laughed off the note, describing his daughter as "a
                   piece of work." But Mr. Swanson believes Mr. Puntambekar forwarded
                   the message to him and another supervisor to show them how stressful his
                   life had become.

                   Then Mr. Puntambekar's mother died in London. He attended the
                   funeral, but only for a brief visit. A few weeks later, Mr. Puntambekar
                   flew to London to visit a customer without Mr. Swanson's permission --
                   a trip, Mr. Swanson guesses, that had more to do with family than
                   business. The AT&T visit is three weeks away. Mr. Swanson is in agony.
                   He wakes his wife several times in the middle of the night to discuss
                   whether to crack down on Mr. Puntambekar for insubordination.

                   In the end, he decides to say nothing. When Mr. Puntambekar returns
                   from London, he has regained his energy.

                   Sycamore still isn't ready, and postpones the visit. Major bugs plague the
                   software, and there aren't enough demonstrator switches to
                   simultaneously write new code and fix the bugs. Messrs. Swanson and
                   Puntambekar decide to split the team into two shifts. Mr. Puntambekar
                   and several other software engineers begin leaving the office each evening
                   at about 5:30, then returning around 9 p.m. to work until 2 a.m. Evening
                   hours are spent fixing bugs that have cropped up during the day.

                   As the bake-off approaches, Mr. Swanson often works straight through
                   the night. During one three-day stretch, he spends a total of four hours at
                   home. He refuses to touch caffeine, thinking he might get addicted. The
                   bags under his eyes grow bigger.

                   `Are We Gonzo?'

                   On the morning of April 24, Mr. Swanson sits in a specially designed
                   control room at Sycamore headquarters here, anxiously fiddling with
                   computer monitors. Whirring in a room next to him, behind a large glass
                   window, are the four switches, the result of more than a year of
                   round-the-clock effort. Mr. Swanson taps his leg nervously, then turns to
                   Leif Uptegrove, head of Sycamore's quality testing. There are minutes to
                   go before the bake-off begins.

                   "Are we gonzo?"

                   "We're gonzo," Mr. Uptegrove says, signaling they are ready to go.

                   At the start of the demonstration, the AT&T team seems relaxed, almost
                   jovial. In addition to the switch, Sycamore is showing off its network
                   "emulator" -- software that permits a computerized representation of a
                   map of the U.S. fiber network with as many as 100 switches placed in
                   key cities. Using the program, Sycamore tells AT&T, it can create new
                   fiber-optic circuits by dragging a computer mouse across the screen, as
                   opposed to the tedious process of reprogramming switches all along the
                   circuit, as is standard practice.

                   The emulator is a massive hit. Current fiber-optics are "dumb" devices
                   incapable of generating easy-to-use maps. But the emulator shows the
                   AT&T engineers that if they go with Sycamore, they won't just be getting
                   a new switch; they will get unprecedented real-time information on which
                   stretches of line are open, which are full, and where there are
                   breakdowns.

                   Seated inside a small cubicle, Mr. Putambekar and another Sycamore
                   engineer show an AT&T representative how traffic would be re-routed
                   from Seattle to Orlando, Fla., if a line were cut. The Sycamore engineers
                   click a computer mouse to simulate the cut, and the screen shows a
                   flashing line between Washington and Florida to indicate an emergency.

                   Immediately, a new route through the Midwest is displayed on the screen.
                   "I love the technology," says one AT&T representative, who can't hide
                   his enthusiasm, grabbing Mr. Putambekar by the arm as they sit together
                   at the console.

                   `Our Game to Lose Now'

                   The AT&T team spends all week in Chelmsford, more than Mr.
                   Swanson expected. Sycamore still hasn't managed to expedite the time it
                   takes to re-route traffic below a second, but assures AT&T that
                   improvements are imminent.

                   AT&T has made no decision yet whether to buy the SN 16000, but Mr.
                   Swanson says the phone company has told him that it will probably bring
                   several switches back to its labs in New Jersey for testing later this
                   summer. AT&T declines to comment.

                   "It's our game to lose now," Mr. Swanson says. Prospects are also
                   looking bright with Williams, a fast-growing carrier in Tulsa with a large
                   fiber-optic network. Last year, Williams chose to work with Ciena in
                   developing switches. At the time, Ciena told Williams that it was just
                   several months away from having a version of the product for field trials,
                   according to Anthony Wright, Williams's chief lab technologist for optical
                   networking. Mr. Wright and other Williams engineers say the Ciena
                   switch has had had numerous software and hardware problems. The field
                   trials are still several months off.

                   Now, Williams is testing switches from both Ciena and Sycamore. Over
                   lunch in Tulsa with Mr. Swanson and several other Sycamore engineers,
                   Satya S. Baddipudi, a Williams software engineer helping to oversee the
                   tests, says he had found a large number of software bugs in the Ciena
                   product. "I've been breaking their stuff for three months," he says, adding,
                   "They hate me." Mr. Wright says Williams still hasn't made a decision
                   about which switch to test in the field first, but that Ciena is "still not there.
                   They have had a lot of problems." He adds that there is a good chance
                   that Sycamore will receive an order from Williams for the switch.

                   Mr. Wright says Williams has been very impressed with Sycamore's
                   product, especially the emulator. The software is "absolutely the best"
                   Williams has seen, he says. A Ciena spokesman denies that there have
                   been problems with its product.

                   On May 9, Sycamore engineers assemble for a meeting with Mr. Smith,
                   the CEO. As part of a management shuffle, Mr. Smith announces that
                   Mr. Swanson is being re-assigned to another project within the company.
                   Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Smith says he considers the SN 16000 already a
                   success, and he wants Mr. Swanson for another project at Sycamore that
                   is behind schedule and needing help.

                   The new job, which expands his responsibilities, is bittersweet for Mr.
                   Swanson. He views it as a vote of confidence from Sycamore, but he
                   misses his colleagues from Project Orange, which was his baby for more
                   than a year. Mr. Swanson discussed the new job with his wife for several
                   weeks before he accepted. The couple agreed it was an opportunity he
                   couldn't pass up.

                   The new job has meant more hours, and more headaches. Last month,
                   Ms. Swanson came to her husband's office and marked his calendar with
                   a vacation to Nantucket the family was planning to take in mid-June, soon
                   after their son Zachary's eighth birthday. It was to be the first family
                   sojourn in several years.

                   Swamped in his new role, Mr. Swanson was asked recently if the trip
                   was still on. "Unfortunately," he says, "I don't think it's going to happen."