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5 Downtown Professionals It was late March 2007 and I was in a kombi, speeding in the direction of “Centro,” Rio’s commercial district. Taking elevated highways from the campus of Rio’s Federal University on Ilha do Fundão, the minivan flew over many of Rio’s favelas, finally landing on Avenida Getúlio Vargas, a block-wide avenue, cleared in the mid-twentieth century to modernize the city. I got off at Rua Uruguaiana, a pedestrian street that serves as an entry point to a few remaining blocks of old windy streets, lined with lunch restaurants and office fashion stores, and filled with vendors selling pirated films and counterfeit watches. After two blocks, I arrived at Largo da Carioca , a wide square at the heart of Rio’s business district. There I waited for Rodrigo Miranda who was going to take me to “Alta,” a successful Java company that, I was hoping, could become one of the sites of my ethnography. Each minute of waiting felt like an hour in Rio’s heat, but I knew it was worth the wait. I had spent the previous few weeks trying unsuccessfully to get myself allowed to come and spend a month inside a Java company. Rodrigo’s introduction could make all the difference. When Rodrigo arrived a few minutes later, we headed south, crossing Avenida Rio Branco, and entering a tall building that was all too familiar to me—I had by that point interviewed people from no fewer than three companies in that building. As is typical in such office buildings in Rio, the lobby had a system of “optimized” elevators, each going only to a range of ten floors, some of them with long lines. Joining the longest line we ran into several guys Rodrigo knew; it turned out all of them worked for Alta. We followed them to the office, which Rodrigo entered without introducing himself at the door, as if his presence there was perfectly natural. We paused only briefly in the lobby to appreciate the fancy engraved logo on the glass panel that separated the lobby from a large room. As we entered the large room, I saw three dozen tables, organized into bays and separated by short dividers. Everyone had exactly the same 116 Chapter 5 table—including the owners of the company. All but one person looked under thirty. It seemed like a by-the-book implementation of a Silicon Valley startup from the late 1990s, complete with a beanbag. I followed Rodrigo as he shook hands with people, nodding, making our way toward “Felipe” and “Luís,” seated at a desk in the corner. It turned out that they were two of the three cofounders of Alta. The four of us went to a conference room where Rodrigo introduced me as a Berkeley doctoral student and a Herculoid. “Herculoids” was the name of Rodrigo’s private mailing list, which he used mostly to forward technology news. When introducing two subscribers who had not met before, Rodrigo almost always introduced them to each other as “Herculoids.” (“It’s like saying that you are a friend,” he explained to me after we left Alta.) Rodrigo summarized my research project and talked about what an “opportunity” it had been to be interviewed by me and how he strongly recommended that Felipe and Luís agree to be interviewed as well. The two seemed unsure of what to make of me but started talking about their company. They were two of the three cofounders, all recent graduates of PUC-Rio’s Computational Engineering program. Felipe was now increasingly doing “the commercial part.” Luís was working on a new company inside Alta. The third co-founder, “Eduardo,” was Alta’s main “technical guy.” Earlier they all used to work with any programming language a client asked for, but now they were trying to focus on Java. Ninety-nine percent of their work was now in Java, said Felipe. “99.9 percent,” Luís corrected him. This chapter looks at Alta as a relatively typical context of software work in Rio de Janeiro, providing a background for the later discussion of Lua and Kepler. I use the word “typical” with caution, however. Already in 2007, Alta was a highly successful company that in many ways seemed to have played all of its cards right. When I returned to Alta a year and a half later, I discovered that it had grown substantially, employing close to a...

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