New Thinking Vital to Survival

Many of the once-highflying dot-com workers who’ve lost their jobs are discovering that they need new strategies--from low-paying temporary work to retraining--to cope with longer periods of unemployment than they ever imagined.

“There were some very talented people working for these” high-tech companies, said Fred Hobbs, marketing director for JustTechJobs.com of Boulder, Colo., “and now they are having to apply to more staid companies who can afford to be more selective. The contractors were the high-paid hotshots who came and went, but I suspect more companies are looking to hire people who will be around for a while.

“There was a sense once that anything on the Web, any technology, was going to make money, but there were no solid business plans,” he said.

That dot-com meltdown has left tech worker Joe Covert, 54, “stuck” in Jefferson City, Mo. Covert was the archetype of the nomadic computer programming expert, having chased bigger and bigger paychecks across 15 states in the last 10 years. He says he earned as much as $150,000 a year, enough to allow a good life for his seven-member family and allow his wife her wish of staying at home to raise their children. Covert took a three-month contract last year that was not renewed.

“I’ve moved my family all around. I’ve killed them just about,” said Covert, who has had to borrow heavily from relatives to stay afloat. The last job “didn’t turn out to be a good move. I’m also not a saver, and that has been a big mistake. At one time, I had about $10,000 in an IRA. I had to spend that for living expenses. I just misjudged it. I have to take the credit for that. I saw the end coming, but not how quickly, not how deep and how long.”

So Covert may have to resort to the moving van once again, but for a much longer trip. “Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be bad. England wouldn’t be bad,” said Covert, willing to bank on one last big move just to get his family back on their financial feet.

Denice Singleton, a laid-off Web copy editor and producer, is staying put to wait for the right job and the right company to come along. The 38-year-old mother from Westchester, N.Y., has faced serious setbacks before and is fueled by the knowledge that she has always persevered and has always been able to bounce back.

It’s an optimism one can feel from her daughter and from Singleton’s mother, although Singleton’s own confidence has a different edge, honed by determination and a bit of anger.

Singleton worked for three struggling start-up companies before she was laid off by Physicians Online in November.

“I had no savings,” she said. “I just didn’t think I would be laid off.”

Now, she’s doing temporary work and earning about half of her former $48,000 annual salary. Singleton, who’s looking for a job in technical writing and Web design, said this time, she’s got some requirements for her future employer.

“They will have to have been in business for a while, showing a profit and doing well on the stock market,” Singleton said.

She recently turned down a job with a start-up that billed itself as a Dr. Koop-style online medical information business, referring to former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. “But they weren’t Dr. Koop, and he didn’t last too long at that Web business either.”

Not everyone is as confident as Singleton.

Eric Earl, a former systems engineer from Atlanta who was laid off by a microwave technology company on Valentine’s Day, said that at age 57, he’s frightened, even though he had a year of expenses saved up.

“My wife is an engineer” and still working, Earl said, “but at my age, I’m concerned. I’ve sent out 70 resumes, and I’ve only gotten two responses.”

Pay Scale Readjustment

The lack of jobs often means lower paying contract work for laid-off dot-commers.

Bob Adkins, 46, a senior network engineer, had worked for a company that hadn’t been able to pay him for months and was shut down in March when the venture capitalists who could have bailed them out got fed up with his boss and pulled out “the day we were supposed to get paid.”

The Fairfax County, Va., resident says he has found some contract work but has had to cut his rates by 25%.

His six-month emergency fund has been tapped. Now, Adkins is trying to avoid dipping into his 401(k).

Fortunately, his wife, Connie, is still employed as a database administrator.

“So, we’re not in absolute dire straits,” Adkins said, who finds himself competing with overqualified job seekers who also have been laid off.

Adkins, who has an 18-month-old son, said he longs for a federal contract job in which he could “just hide out for a year or two. . . . I would love to get out of the dot-com world altogether.”

Yet, for some, being a contractor is troublesome.

“Contractors are limited by what they will be allowed to do within a company, and we’re always the first to be let go,” said Arthur Gallun Jr., 30, of Los Gatos, Calif. “I wouldn’t mind working for another start-up, but it would have to be a permanent position.”

Gallun, who worked as a network administrator, did have six months of living expenses saved. He put most of his belongings in storage and is living in his parents’ house to save money on rent, even if that comes with the occasional indignity of having to interrupt telephone calls to shout to his dad that he’s on the phone.

“My options have changed,” he said. “Even a year ago, when things were fantastic for contractors, I was thinking that I wanted a permanent position.”

Now, Gallun has a new pitch, trying to use the state’s energy crisis to his advantage by marketing himself as an expert in producing safe data backup systems for companies whose servers have to be shut down during brownouts or blackouts.

Training Could Help Candidate Stand Out

Repackaging oneself is often helpful. The much-moved Covert, like other dot-com refugees, realizes that retraining also may be necessary.

Employers have pigeonholed him as “COBAL Man,” Covert said. COBAL is the name for one of the earliest computer programming languages.

“The toughest thing is getting myself retooled to what the market wants, and the one thing I have failed to do is capitalize on my skills with other computer languages and systems,” he said.

Covert is bolstered by the knowledge that he has survived far worse than this.

“I believe there is a way; it’s just a matter of finding it,” he said. “I was in combat on the ground in Vietnam, 25th Infantry Division. You go back in your mind to the hardest thing you’ve ever done. I ask myself how this stacks up, and the answer is that it doesn’t. This is nowhere near as frightening and difficult and uncertain.”

Network engineer Adkins is thinking about obtaining higher certification in his skill areas, even though he insists that they won’t teach him anything he doesn’t already know. “I may have to because the employers now insist that you have them,” he said.

Laid-off Web producer and designer Paul Buch, 47, of Los Angeles has set his sights far higher than certification, you might say. He’s going to attend school to become a cantor, the official of a synagogue who conducts the liturgical part of the service and sings or chants the prayers intended to be performed as solos.

“I’ve been in the working world for 20 years,” he said. “Your expectation then was of a great job and a great career for the long term. I went from that to a situation in which I wondered if there would be anyone left around to notice if I just left work one day. The kind of life I want to build with my family isn’t based on that kind of uncertainty.

“I have my life back,” Buch said. “You don’t often get a chance to build a life for yourself that you can wake up every morning and feel good about.”