Dancing in dot.death throes

ANDREW GUMBEL finds a strange euphoria among dot.com staff who find it trendy to be out of work.


This is the way the dot.coms die.

First, the massage therapist is dropped. Then the free beer on Friday afternoons goes.

Employees are told they can only take paid days off on national holidays. A ban goes out on sending overnight courier packages. The juice and soda disappears from the company fridge.

And then it gets really nasty: the rumours of layoffs, the backbiting, the last-ditch attempts to curry favour with management and dish up dirt on the other guy.

"You know it's really 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 any more,"

She has something of a unique vantage-point. Since leaving her high-tech job and watching friends get laid off by the dozen, she has organised a series of monthly "pink-slip parties" where the latest cull from the dot.com slaughter can meet, commiserate, socialise and try to find new jobs.

It is a bizarre scene. In the very nightclubs and trendy restaurants that a few short months ago were hosting lavish corporate shindigs every night, the same crowd of black-clad, mostly young computer engineers, marketing executives, project managers and designers come together to face a different sort of music.

The recently unemployed, many of them clutching leather folders stuffed with carefully honed CVs for distribution, wear nametags with red dots to help them mingle with potential employers, who identify themselves with green dots and throw business cards around like candy.

A banner draped near the dance floor advertises the services of psychics and astrologers to help people divine where their next pay cheque will come from.

One enterprising soul has a sandwich board affair around her neck with concertina files hanging off it.

Everywhere there is chatter - how recruitment firms are now 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 down.

What makes the parties bizarre is that people genuinely seem to enjoy themselves.

In fact, they are noticeably more buoyant than they ever were during the bashes thrown at the height of the boom - laughing louder, drinking more joyously, meeting far more people. It is like a strange euphoria overtaking a wounded soldier moments before death.

"It's trendy to be out of work right now, because everyone is," says consultant Debbie McGillis.

"People have generally got 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 do not look good. Executive recruitment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas says 10,459 dot.commers lost their jobs in the United States in December, and another 12,828 went last month.

First it was the internet retailers and the advertising-driven "content" sites that went under; now it is the back-up companies, the consultants and design firms that cannot survive if the first rank of web start-ups falls.

In the last fortnight, Disney closed its online division and Amazon.com said it would lay off 15 per cent of its workforce. Last week, there were job cuts at Barnes & Noble's web service, at the technology news site Cnet and at an internet support company called Infospace, where the layoffs were sinisterly referred to as "realigned resources."

Etoys, the games retailer, announced its imminent closure, and there were rumours of big cuts in the offing at Yahoo!, one of the web's leading portals, hit like everyone else by the slump in advertising.

Some of the former dot.commers retain a cheery optimism in the face of almost unremitting grimness - the same spirit that enabled companies to raise money even though they had no viable business model and next to no product.

Jen Hadd worked for a notoriously loopy outfit called AllAdvan-tages.com, now defunct, whose conceit was to pay people to surf the web all day in the vague hope of attracting advertisers.

"I still think it's a great idea," she insists.

But along with such instances of denial has come an increasing cynicism. The internet was always a sector prone to a cocky sense of entitlement - to jobs, share options and big money windfalls - and some workers at troubled companies, rather than fighting on behalf of their employers, are now watching DVDs on their computers and visiting online chatrooms, biding their time and collecting their pay until the inevitable layoff notices arrive.

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.

It has become commonplace to mock the very instances of dot.com corporate speak ("The wireless company that believes in self-expression," or "a company that provides strategic, creative and technology solutions to some of the world's most successful digital businesses") that hoodwinked the venture capitalists in the first place and blew up the internet bubble.

"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 layoffs are announced with 15 minutes' notice and bewildered employees are escorted to the door by security guards. It has become common for employees' computers to be 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 here," said one still-employed dot.commer about his workplace.

"One minute we were the cutting edge of the world. Now the Gestapo has arrived."