But in Silicon Valley, unions were weak, and Sporck was committed to keeping it that way. He and his colleagues at Fairchild were “dead set” against unions, he declared. A practical, down-to-earth engineer, Sporck wasn’t a stereotypical union buster. He kept his offices so austere that they were compared to an army barracks. Sporck was proud of giving most employees stock options, a practice that was virtually unknown in the old East Coast electronics firms. But he’d ruthlessly insist, in exchange, that these same employees commit to maximizing their productivity. Unlike East Coast electronics
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