No Shortage for Tech Survivors

The day Productopia.com shut down, Joanna Nissen was talking on her cell phone about being laid off as she rode the bus to the office to clear out her desk.

Overhearing Nissen, another rider approached.

Learning she was a computer systems administrator, the stranger asked whether she’d be interested in Kinecta Corp., a privately held online content-management services company.

Nissen gave the man her information.

By the time she got to her old desk at Productopia 15 minutes later, Nissen already had an e-mail lining up an interview. Three days later, she had a new job, earning more than she had at Productopia.

“It was pretty darn quick,” said the 31-year-old Nissen.

Despite all the layoffs and “dot-com” closures, survivors like Nissen don’t have to do much looking.

Most of the 60 Productopians got jobs within weeks after the company’s dissolution. Others remain unemployed by choice--fending off recruiters, refraining from posting their resumes online, enjoying the respite from the 14-hour days that define life at a start-up.

Still others are doing freelance or contract work to buy time before making a more permanent decision.

Public relations manager Melissa Sheridan was getting as many as 10 calls a day from headhunters beginning Oct. 2, the day Productopia brass told the staff that funding had been cut off.

Sheridan weighed five offers and was back to work within a month--this time at public relations firm OutCast Communications, which works with many dot-coms but isn’t one.

“I was focused on finding a job where it wasn’t reliant on just one technology that may or may not work,” she said. “I wanted to minimize the risk.”

Anne Gates, Productopia’s former design director, turned down an offer from a company that admitted it had only enough money to last through January. Company officials told her they would have more funding by then; she told them to call back when the cash was in the bank.

“The companies are just as desperate to get people, but employees are more critical,” said Howard Lee of Silver & Lee Associates, a recruitment firm. “They’re picking and choosing better, getting smarter and going with companies that have a better chance to succeed.”

That doesn’t mean all dot-coms have lost their appeal. The excitement of technology start-up work is what encouraged Dee Dee Anderson to abandon years of advocacy work at the National Organization for Women.

Anderson, 29, moved in August 1998 from Washington to San Francisco with $700 and got a job--complete with stock options--with an Internet start-up, Flycast Communications.

She struggled initially with her conscience, feeling she had moved from a career with a good cause to one rooted in making someone “at the top rich.”

“Then I started paying down my bills,” she said.

Flycast was later acquired. Anderson did well with her stock options and started working at Productopia in July.

“The dot-com movement is like the youth movement of the ‘60s--that time was an extraordinary time of energy and hope,” said John Challenger, president of the job placement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc. “People are going to fight to hold on to that.”