In dot.com valley, the 'pink slips' are falling like confetti
By Andrew Gumbel in San Francisco
10 February 2001
This is how the dot.coms die. First, the massage therapist is dropped.
Then the free beer on Friday dries up. Juice and soda disappear from
the office fridge. Overnight courier packages are banned. Employees
are told they can take paid days off only on national holidays.
Then it gets really nasty: the rumours of lay-offs, the backbiting,
last-ditch attempts to curry favour with management and dishing the
dirt on the other guy.
"You know it's bad when senior management starts pulling people into
their offices for one-on-one meetings," says Patty Beron, a flinty
veteran of San Francisco's great internet adventures. "Then it's just a
matter of time before you come into work to find your CD-Rom drive
locked. Or maybe your access card won't open the door." She has a
unique vantage point. Since leaving her hi-tech job and watching her
friends get laid off by the dozen, she has organised monthly "pink-slip
parties" – the slip being the American equivalent of the P45 – where
the latest cull from the dot.com slaughter can meet, commiserate,
socialise and try to find new jobs.
The scene is bizarre. In the nightclubs and trendy restaurants which a
few months ago were hosting lavish corporate shindigs nightly, the
same crowd of mostly young computer engineers, marketing
executives, project managers and designers meet to face a different
sort of music.
The recently unemployed, many clutching leather folders stuffed with
carefully honed CVs for distribution, wear name tags with red dots, all
the better to help them mingle with potential employers, who identify
themselves with green dots and throw business cards around like
sweeties.
A banner advertises the services of psychics and astrologers to help
people divine where their next pay cheque is coming from. One
enterprising soul has a sandwich board affair around her neck.
Everywhere there is chatter, how recruitment firms are currently
hiring, how engineers are still in demand, how business development
experts might find their niche in three or four months once the
shake-out begins to calm.
What makes the parties bizarre is that people genuinely seem to enjoy
themselves. In fact, they are noticeably more buoyant than they were
during the bashes thrown at the height of the boom, laughing louder,
drinking more joyously, meeting far more people, almost the strange
euphoria into which a mortally wounded casualty can float moments
before death.
"It's trendy to be out of work now, because everyone is," says an
older, more world-weary consultant, Debbie McGillis. "People have
generally had good severance packages and the pain hasn't begun to
bite. Give it another month and it'll all look a whole lot worse."
The figures certainly don't look good. An executive recruitment firm,
Challenger, Gray and Christmas, calculates that 10,459 dot.commers
in America lost their jobs in December, and a further 12,828 went in
January. First the internet retailers and the advertising-driven
"content" sites went under, now the backup companies, the
consultants and design firms are crumbling.
Last week, Disney closed its online division and Amazon.com laid off
15 per cent of its workforce. This week, there were job cuts at
Barnes & Noble's internet service, at the technology news site Cnet
and at a internet support company called Infospace, where the
lay-offs were sinisterly referred to as "realigned resources".
Etoys, the games retailer, announced its imminent closure, and there
are rumours of big cuts in the offing at Yahoo!, hit, like everyone else,
by the slump in advertising.
Cynicism is increasing. The internet was always a sector prone to a
cocky sense of entitlement, to jobs, to stock options, to big-money
windfalls, now some workers at troubled companies spend all day
watching DVDs on their computers and visiting online chatrooms,
biding their time and collecting their pay cheques until the inevitable
lay-off notice arrives.
You sense the cynicism in the jokes on the web ("What comes after
right-sizing and down-sizing? Answer: capsizing.") and in the
near-glee with which the demise of much-hated management
structures is often described.
Dot.com corporate-speak is widely mocked, "the wireless company
that believes in self-expression, a company that provides strategic",
"creative and technology solutions to some of the world's most
successful digital businesses". That was the language that
hoodwinked the venture capitalists in the first place. "Most of it was
just branding and spin," says Debbie McGillis. "The venture capitalists
bought it because none of them wanted to admit they didn't know
what the hell it meant."
The cynicism extends to senior management, especially in companies
where lay-offs are announced with 15 minutes' notice and bewildered
employees are escorted to the door by security guards. Frequently,
employees' computers are seized and their hard drives scoured for
evidence of any indiscretion that could justify a firing without
severance privileges.
"You can just imagine what morale is like around my place," said one
still-employed dot.commer.
"One minute we were the cutting edge of the world. Now the Gestapo
has arrived." |
