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Article: Dot-com Doldrums

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Dot-com Doldrums

With techno music pounding behind her and the smoke of a nearby cigarette curling around her head, Lydia Sugarman waded through the Manhattan crowd at last month's "Pink Slip Holiday Tribute Bash" for laid-off dot-com workers and added her business card to a collection of defunct dot-com cards.  "Lydia Sugarman, managing editor, We The Shoppers.com."

Once an account manager for an advertising firm, Sugarman joined We The Shoppers.com, an online shopping guide, in October 1999, and edited the site for nearly a year until she got fired in July.  Since then, she's been looking for jobs as a dot-com editor or business development specialist.  The search, which has now stretched over five months, has grown frustrating.

"I made $80,000 and did the job of a managing editor very capably, but people look at my resume and see 10 months and they say you're not experienced enough," Sugarman said. "I don't have an MBA. I just have 25 years of work experience."

Last spring, the online garden seemed fertile enough to support several varieties of Internet-based businesses, from community sites such as We The Shoppers.com, to content sites such as MaMaMedia, to e-consultants such as MarchFirst.  But as outside irrigation money dried up, these dot-com businesses have failed and new jobs have grown scarcer for content or marketing folks such as Sugarman.  But happily for some, not all Internet jobs have shriveled up and blow away.  Recruiters say the laid-off programmer or more technically inclined dot-com worker can still find a bumper harvest of job offers.

"It's always tougher to find a job when you don't have a job," said Brendan Bergin,a recruiter with Information Technology Partners, a Manhattan-based IT recruiting firm.  "But if you have marketable skills, you can command whatever salary you want."

Recruiters say IT jobs still outnumber available IT personnel.

"There's a lot of jobs out there, but it's really hard to find a good candidate," said Jennifer Roman, also a recruiter at Information Technology Partners.  "If I can find a good guy I know he's got five other offers."

~ A look at a few Internet job boards confirms that IT jobs still abound -- and seem even more plentiful so when compared to other sorts of dot-com jobs.  By the second week in January, the New York New Media Association's job board contained 250 job listings for tech positions, but only 40 listings for writer/editor spots, and 54 for business development jobs.  At another job board, SiliconAlley.com, jobs for programmers, management information systems and server support numbered 121; jobs for writers and editors numbered three.

"They don't have the marketable skills," Bergin said of these content producers.  "Every company needs people like that.  But they only need five of them."

Other recruiters said while newer and smaller Internet businesses may have suffered a disastrous year, continued technical hiring at larger companies -- those who create and maintain the Internet's infrastructure or produce its semi-conductor chips, for example -- has offset the losses at pure-play dot-com businesses.

"There are enough companies in non-dot com businesses that are still doing a lot to add staff," said Gary Omura, the managing principal of the Omura Consulting Group in Silicon Valley.  "If you have 10 small start ups with 100 employees each, that's only 1,000 employees. You have some Internet infrastructure company that might have 1,000 employees now but might want to grow to 2,000 next year.  So you can have 10 small companies go out of business, and that one large company's going to more than make up for that displacement."

Those sorts of calculations, of course, offer little consolation to the employees of those 10 smaller companies.  For some of these folks, the soured economy has convinced them to abandon pure-play Internet companies for jobs with more traditional employers.

"Some of the people that went into the e-tailing, e-commerce, or consumer oriented business are shying away and going into infrastructure related Internet companies as well as non-internet companies," Omura said.

~ After the crime-news site APBnews.com folded in July -- becoming in the process a symbol of failed dot-com content strategies -- several reporters returned to traditional newspapers such as the New York Post, Bergen Record and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Officials at the Columbia Journalism School, a traditional feeder for many journalism openings, say they've noticed a return to the traditional balance between old-line media and new media hiring.  Last March, the school's annual career fair attracted so many new media employers that the school had to sponsor a second event, "The New Media Jamboree," two weeks later.

"Last year, it was huge, it was off the Richter scale," said Melanie Huff, the school's career services coordinator.  "This year, it's not going to be.  In fact, I hear the bodies who are in new media now are losing their jobs."

E-consulting -- one of the hardest hit sectors in the Internet industry -- has also churned back some professionals back into traditional, old-economy offices. When David Rapson got laid off from Gen3 Partners, a Boston-area e-consulting firm, in September, he set about looking for a new job -- outside of the Internet industry.  After a month's search, Rapson found a job with Cambridge Strategic Management Group, a consulting firm that specializes in telecommunicaitons.

"There's a lot of demand out there for talent so I knew I'd find something," Rapson said.  "But if I were in a less stable work environment right now, I would be a little bit concerned because of what's been going on the past three months.  A lot of people who are really skilled are going to be entering the job market continually over the next several months, and that's really going to increase the competition."