Dot-com Layoffs

Marco Anglesio mpa at the-wire.com
Thu Jan 25 22:25:27 PST 2001


On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Peter Kosenko wrote:
> I don't know what to think about all the twenty-somethings who went to
> work for dotcom turkeys thinking that they were starting "careers."
> In my life I have learned the hard way that you don't rely on
> employers or buy their hype.

It's a pretty good start to one. That said, I work, not for a dot-com, but a consultancy which focuses on the internet, and a lot of our clients are either dot-coms or the dot-com arms of established firms. There's a lot of variation in the technical (or management) savvy of these clients, much more than I'd tend to expect.

The first two questions that I asked my interviewer were about turnover and profitability. I'd worked as a contractor for a while before starting here, and while contracting is hardly a "career" it's certainly a job. The result is that I've been here for two years (nearly to the day), the company has more than tripled in size and been acquired by a multinational in a related business.

I don't think that anyone in their twenties, and certainly not someone with the ambition to go work for a startup, thinks of a job as being their entire, lifetime career. People tend to bounce around quite a bit, especially technical experts. Unfortunately, most dot-com employees (like employees everywhere) are competent, but not top-notch experts, and may well just drop out of the labour pool in a bad economic spell.

Marco

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> Marco Anglesio | pigs fly just fine. <
> mpa at the-wire.com | However, this is not <
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