‘Dot-Com’ Energy May Be Doomed to Fizzle Into Midlife Stagnation

In this election year, many Americans seem to be teetering between the contentment of prosperity and anxiety due to a turbulent and uncertain economy. Last week, the stock market was “groping for the bottom,” as one analyst put it, rattling the nerves of shareholders, while at the same time an industry report predicted that more than a million and a half jobs would be created in information technology fields this year and that half of those would go unfilled.

Most of my friends are now middle-aged, like me, and their careers started well before the current Internet craze. They’re watching the “new economy” unfold with very mixed emotions. Some of them have found or crafted interesting and stimulating careers, while others are disappointed by where they find themselves now.

A few of my friends’ stories are good examples. The people below have asked that their real names not be used, so I’m using pseudonyms.

Angie has a doctorate in English and has worked for a couple of decades as a journalist, author and magazine editor. Several years ago it became apparent that the number of publications that would publish her serious, probing articles were dwindling, and her income was following suit. So she took a breather from the stresses of freelancing by joining a small information services company as an editor and writer. It was her first 9-to-5 job in a long time.

“It started out as a nice place to work,” she said, “with a real family feeling. But then it was bought by a much larger company, and things changed very quickly.

“When the company was bought, the new parent company sent these two guys down to our office for a pep talk--they were like cheerleaders, they had this dog-and-pony show. They were very slick, but they didn’t have a clue what we did or how their new acquisitions fit together.” She added, “Those two guys later got fired.”

The working environment went downhill from there, Angie said. The parent company was clueless, she said, and the result was a series of stern memos from the remote home office about new employee requirements, new bosses and a new computer system that robbed the editors and writers of their creative input and turned them into data entry clerks.

“Only the computer guys seemed to know what was going on,” Angie said. While the computer technicians fiddled with their database program, the office’s desktop computers crashed several times a day. Morale started to sink and eventually layoffs and departures set in.

Angie quit before things got worse. She looks back on the experience as an example of what it must be like to work for an information company, and she doesn’t want to be part of that world again.

Bob is an exploration geologist for a large oil company, with advanced degrees from Stanford and 18 years in the business. His personal horrors are the serial management fads that sweep through his company, which has been sagging in stock market value, market share and employee morale.

“The latest phrase is ‘asset teams,’ ” he said with contempt. “No one knows what that means, but everyone has to get on board and get with this latest new program. They sent a team of guys with Power Point slides to tell us all about it, but no one understood it. We’ve seen it before--in another six months, it will be something else.” Bob thinks these fads are a sign of desperation, and of managers cooking up reasons for the company to keep them.

He also thinks the upper management of his company is incompetent and is manipulating the company’s finances to “loot” the cash flow--with executive perks, bonuses and stock options--while the firm itself stagnates.

Bob is going to give the company another year or two to improve before he bails out. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do after that because employment in the rapidly consolidating oil business is sinking fast.

John, who holds a doctorate in chemical engineering, has already faced that problem. He’s been laid off from his job with a Los Angeles oil company. Getting another job in this industry is nearly impossible, and starting in a new industry is very difficult. “We’re so specialized, it’s a nightmare,” he said. There are jobs for chemical engineers in pharmaceuticals or semiconductors, but those companies want either new graduates or people with years of experience in exactly the same subfield, John said. He doesn’t know what he’ll do.

“Who’s to blame? I don’t know. I don’t want to appear that I’m blaming anyone,” he said.

Ray is an entrepreneur. He started the company Angie worked for. He’s doing well, as one might expect. But, he said, “I started my company without borrowing money and without venture capital. It was a hard row to hoe. Now I look at these new companies with all this money and I have to ask, ‘Did they earn this?’ When you fly these days, the first-class section seems awfully young.”

Ray said, “The sense of entitlement among the young today is in for a rude awakening. Sooner or later business fundamentals kick in, and then you have to work really hard just to survive. The world view of young workers now is based on this very limited experience.”

Middle-aged people are prone to self-reflection and self-assessment, as in the cliche of the midlife crisis. They also seem inclined to view the energy, idealism and naivete of younger generations with some skepticism and annoyance. This is a pattern that must be as old as the human species itself.

But younger people should regard stories such as those of my friends with the perspective that this is likely to be their future too. My friends began with the same high hopes and naive faith in the future that is common among the young, hip and affluent urban workers of the new economy.

And just as it was hard for our elders and our parents to explain to us that the world wouldn’t greet our youthful idealism with open arms, we now find it difficult to explain to the young “dot-com” generation that things don’t always turn out like you plan. This is especially worth remembering in the face of a looming dot-com shakeout.

Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.