Net Firms Draw Young Job Seekers
When Jeff Albertson graduated from Vermont’s Middlebury College last year, he turned away promising career opportunities at giant Microsoft and stable job offers in local government to join Free Range Media, a small but fast-growing company here that designs World Wide Web sites.
Today, while many of his former classmates in political science are still getting their feet wet, Albertson, 23, is already a program manager leading Web page development efforts for the likes of the giant Westin hotel chain and Microsoft.
“It’s a great experience to be working with big companies and learning how they do business without having to actually work for them,” he says.
Albertson is one of tens of thousands of young adults flocking to Internet start-ups, the latest growth engine in the nation’s turbocharged high-tech economy.
Young, well-educated and computer literate, these men and women have the confidence and versatility to tie their destinies to the fast-changing, quirky and often unpredictable jobs that pop up and disappear with the ebb and flow of technology.
Many in their mid-20s are already refugees of the multimedia CD-ROM business, an industry that exploded on the scene just a few years ago and is already facing a fierce shakeout. They have a healthy skepticism of corporate America and a jaundiced view of the nation’s traditional “one-way” news media.
The Free Rangers make their home in a refurbished brick building in Seattle’s old Pioneer Square. The firm’s 65 employees and two-year history make it one of the oldest and largest Web design companies.
With a client list that includes blue-chip companies like Hewlett-Packard, Penzoil and Caterpillar, Free Range is a blend of the free-wheeling Net culture and the hard realities of the bottom line.
“You have the balance between the kids in the garage and the more mature business people,” says Ann Kirschner, a new business development vice president for the National Football League, a Free Range client.
Some of those “kids” include:
* Davey Jolosky, 27. Effusive and red-haired, he is the creative director who did design work for an advertising agency, a water ski company and a multimedia golf tips CD-ROM before joining Free Range.
* Allison Ellis, 26. She worked for a local weekly, two multimedia CD-ROM companies and Microsoft before joining Free Range as editor of a children’s Web site.
* Ash Black, 28, a former guitarist and composer for an “industrial rock” band. He got the Free Range job as Web designer after building his own cyberpunk site--complete with music, art and his own cyber musings about how the Internet is the emerging consciousness of the planet.
With starting pay typically below $30,000 and little in the way of stock options, the money at Free Range is clearly a secondary consideration. Black says he could make twice his existing salary at Microsoft, but he says he likes the opportunity to be creative and learn about the Internet at an “exponential rate.”
With the Internet so new, opportunities are indeed wide open. “Six months of experience in Web design is pretty good,” says Lynne Butz, Free Range’s Human Resources manager.
Raya Dukham, a 25-year-old painter, joined Free Range as a receptionist to support her art. Fascinated by the online world, she studied HTML, the language of the Internet, while answering the phone. Now she builds Web sites.
Still that’s the exception. Recruits these days are expected to know their way around the Net. After classified ads generated a pile of unpromising resumes, Free Range now does most of its recruiting online. The company lists jobs on its Web site and screens applicants through e-mail.
“When you recruit online, there is self-selection involved,” Butz said. “Those [who apply online] are the kind of people we want.”
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On one recent day, when Free Range was celebrating its two-year anniversary, chief executive Andrew Fry was ruminating on the “early days” when nobody knew what the Internet was.
Today, when Fry, a former Microsoft product manager, tells people that his company is designing Web sites, it doesn’t get much of a reaction: “They say: ‘So is my mom and my cousin. My dog does that.’ ”
