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NY's Silicon Alley Feels The Crunch 115

Posted by Hemos from the bad-times-for-the-big-apple dept.
ephraim writes: "During the last year, I worked for dot-coms in NYC. About four months ago, I began to feel that a downturn in the industry was imminent, so I left to join a more traditional company. Far too many of the companies I consulted for seemed to have serious internal problems that appeared to preclude them from ever making any real money once their venture capital dried up. It turns out that I made the right move. This article from the NY Times Web site (free registration required) discusses the general trends in the industry, while another article on the site looks at the phenomenon through the eyes of one employee of a doomed company. What he says about people sitting around doing nothing is true for quite a few of these companies. While there are still plenty of jobs available for technology people in NY, those looking for work should begin to ask some more discerning questions about prospective employers."
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NY's Silicon Alley Feels The Crunch More

NY's Silicon Alley Feels The Crunch

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  • Don't believe the hype! (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:58AM (#669051)
    I find it odd that people can so selectively believe the mainstream press. When it doesn't fit their worldview, its "hype" and when it does...somehow they're finally correct! Wake up, its ALWAYS hype.

    I've been in the "dot-com" industry before it was called that (from 1995) and worked in the software biz before that. During this time, I've started a couple dot-com's in NYC. One is turning a profit. The other didn't work out and we closed it down. I've also consulted for dozens of firms large and small -- some are making money, some are struggling, some have closed up shop. BIg deal.

    Is it a suprise that companies with bad business models fail? Duh. It doesn't matter how much money VC's throw at you, if your business model is flawed, eventually, you'll fail. The truth of the matter is that many, many companies get started and MOST fail within a few years. This has always been true -- the "downturn" is nothing new and simply a reflection of the disenchantment of financing sources (VC's, wall street, angel's) towards the dot-com "industry". This will turn around -- it always has. The street and VC's are herd animals. They follow each other with abandon.

    One of the things that also bother me is people who say "they won't turn a profit for years!" as if that's some big suprise. The vast majority of new businesses don't turn a profit for years. Magazines typically take 5 years or more to reach positive cash flow. Electronics manufacturing is even worse. Even consulting firms (real ones, not 1 man shops), which you'd think can turn a profit from day one, often take a year or more before they stop bleeding cash. Such is business -- you can't make money without spending it.

    On a side note, can you guess the background of many people at the top of the VC food chain? Most people would say "Wall Street" or "Finance" or something sane like that. Truth is, many (if not most) of the top VC's are ex-"journalists". I use quotes because many of those were that special breed that write those pontificating editorials rather than "reporters" (again in quotes because I'm using that term VERY loosly). No wonder they're (usually) so stupid.

    Anyway the bottom line is that we're almost through the worst of the VC drought. How can I tell? Simple...the mainstream press is writing about it again and again. By the time they start harping on something, you know the worst is almost over.

    Cheers

  • Silicon Alley is a techie desert (Score:5)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:59AM (#669052) Homepage Journal
    (That is, "an empty or forsaken place; a wasteland"; not something you would put whipped cream on.)

    I spent a year and a half at a start-up on 23rd St. (just across the street from Madison Square Park). For the last six months, my title was "Manager, Content Acquisition Software"; I had about half a dozen programmers reporting to me. We shipped client software (and hardware) and ran a production service, but never signed up anywhere near enough customers to approach our expenses.

    One problem was how hard it was finding good technical staff. The quality of the average candidate was pathetic. Most of the C/C++ programmers I interviewed didn't know how to do pointer arithemetic!

    Worse, everyone with even a shred of talent was heavily recruited by Wall Street. The guys down there offered $100K if you could even spell HTML; but they'd expect you to show up, wearing a suit, promptly at 8 a.m. every morning, and wouldn't think twice about expecting you to work until midnight for long stretches. After all, they're paying you big bucks! (Compared to everyone but the traders.) Techies on The Street are lucky to last two years before burning out.

    So where's the nearest techie oasis? Believe it or not, central New Jersey. The legacy of the Bell System, and the huge Bell Labs installations here, has created a seed of talent not often seen outside Silicon Valley. I have friends at half a dozen startups founded here, and several more at companies based in the West Coast but opening offices here to take advantage of the great people. Ten minutes to the east is the Atlantic Ocean; fifteen to the west, horse farms. If you hate surburbs, forget it; if you like them, it's wonderful. Real estate, both residential and commercial, is relatively inexpensive, especially compared to the Valley or the Alley.
  • Yeh maybe we'll start seeing companies being a little wiser in their strategies. I think the hype will only last for so long over dot-coms and then maybe well actually reach an age where we'll see real services that you can rely on.

    Not the type that come and go!
  • Heck, I worked for a Medical site group, and after they grew and bought out a bunch of sites over the course of the year I was there, they laid of 80% of the staff! (including me)
    The site I was involved in 99% of the time was started back in 1995 and had one of the best and earliest health-releated internet communities out there. Then in July 2000, bang, we're all let go.
    Now I'm doing freelance web stuff for a local Ad agency, and THEY just got bought out! However, I don't think they're quite going anywhere: too many large corporate (ie non Dot-Com) and government clients.
    Now I just gotta convince them to hire me... ;)

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • If you want to pick a .com startup that's going to do well (and do well by you), then you have to understand who's behind the company. People in high positions who have been successful in another .coms are more likely to be successful again.

    The reality is that the people behind most successful .com startups predominately belong to an inner circle; they generally all know, worked with, or competed against one another at some point in the past. One .com success breeds any number of other startups that all have that much more likelihood of being successful. Research the backgrounds of the company's management. Have they led other startups to success? Have they worked in high positions in other respectable companies? Have they demonstrated industry leadership skills? The more research you do, the more connections between people you will find, and it will become clearer just where your company is likely to be in the food chain.

    Also, don't just jump to a company because someone makes an attractive pitch about how much funding the company has gotten, or how great its product is. Ask to see the business plan (you may need to sign an NDA), do research on the intended market, judge the company's success based on your own knowledge of the industry.

    If you want to be part of a successful .com startup, you can't let someone else's vision be your guide. You need to be a part of the vision yourself and understand what's going on in the industry.

  • Another alley refugee (Score:4)

    by nabucco ( 24057 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @07:39AM (#669056)
    Like the submittor of this article and many respondents, I work in New York City as an engineer. For the past 5 years I have worked at Internet startups. The company before last was a joke - all smoke and mirrors, they change their business plan and company direction once a year depending on what the market is asking for, somehow they have managed to stay above $10 a share even in the latest downturn. My last company was good in many ways, except I did notice that uncontrolled growth was kicking in after we got a large influx of money and IPO'd. The game was to get big VC, and once getting that grow as fast as possible, become one of the "major players" and then you have nothing to worry about. It was a tide that caught everybody, even if you wanted to spend small, the fact that everyone was throwing money around for office space, talent and machinery would leave you with the dregs. Companies growing slowly who broke even or turned a small profit were looked upon as foolish. Suddenly the market did an about face and is not willing to provide credit to these companies any more and they are left flailing in the wind. Top management and Wall Street benefit, the small investor and employee get screwed. An old story

    Luckily, like the poster, after a few weeks of a general market downturn I had a feeling the tide had turned and working at an Internet company wasn't as attractive as it had used to be. One nice benefit of the whole Internet saga is that traditional companies started becoming more casual - such as starting casual Fridays, and then casual all week. I recently interviewed at virtually every Wall Street company - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns and so on - at every one of them and more the dress code for engineers and others is business casual all week. Someone here said they work you crazy hours - sure, but how is that different than a startup? Ultimately, the only solution to getting paid for the hours you work is to be a consultant getting paid by the hour. Anyone with a few years experience who is working full-time on Wall Street and is not in management is a fool, who usually has what I call a "martyr complex", or an H1-B, who is basically an indentured servant for the company.

    If you are working in New York City at a startup I would strongly suggest you at least interview at some good traditional companies. Then see if they will take you and what they will offer you. If you are rejected from several places, that should be a wake-up call as to your employability if/when the Internet startups finally hit bottom and crap out. You may know that Apache is superior to Netscape and know how to modify Apache source code to do bizarre things in your sleep, but that knowledge is next to worthless in many traditional companies, your magnus.conf knowledge should be magnusificent. Only about half your skills are transportable, and you will flunk like hell when asked how EMC and Veritas Clusters work. So get cracking now.

  • Confucious says (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28, 2000 @07:43AM (#669057)
    when website show 'punch the monkey ad', company is fucked.

  • Worse, everyone with even a shred of talent was heavily recruited by Wall Street. The guys down there offered $100K if you could even spell HTML; but they'd expect you to show up, wearing a suit, promptly at 8 a.m. every morning, and wouldn't think twice about expecting you to work until midnight for long stretches. After all, they're paying you big bucks! (Compared to everyone but the traders.) Techies on The Street are lucky to last two years before burning out.

    This is really exaggerated. The interview process is normally good enough to select semi-decent programmers as a minimum. Many if not all techies get to dress casual these days on Wall St, and most of them do not burn out after two years. On the other hand, $100k is NOT big bucks by Wall St. standards. If you're really good and do work from 8 till midnight a lot, you'd probably be earning 2 or 3 times that in a couple of years.

  • Re:Silicon Alley is a techie desert (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (That is, "an empty or forsaken place; a wasteland"; not something you would put whipped cream on.)

    Problem with silicon alley is that it dumbs every thing down to the level of a moron without a dictionary. Most people know the difference between a desert and dessert.
  • I've been in the situation where I interview people at a job where I wouldn't wish it on anyone to work is such a hell hole (I was looking for other jobs). Plenty of interviews, since people were leaving in droves...

    That's a problematic situation, and my approach was that I wouldn't bring it up, but if they asked I would answer truthfully. Lying to somebody I'd be working with later seems like a real bad idea.

    The boss finding out is not an issue. No job seeker is going to tell him "I was interested until Joe told me you're an evil moron".

  • Any CMS system that requires you to train an employee at a $10,000 vendor class to change templates is seriously flawed.
  • Usually, when money gets tight (as often happens in these startups), it's in my experience that most companies will lay off almost all of the people that actually make the company function and leave just the managers.

    Managers have extremely inflated salaries, artificial authority, and usually know far less about the work they're managing than the employees in that department.

    Why do companies do this? If you're losing a lot of your staff, you would need LESS managers since the displacement from the president should logically decrease as people leave.

    Ho hum

  • This downturn could turn into a recession that lasts two-three years

    Or it could lead to a horrible economic depression that turns into a new Dark Ages and results in the acension of the anti-Christ.
  • Aack, I don't mean to sound so whiney. But I've emailed my resume to 10-12 places and only heard back from the ones where I already had contacts. Maybe my standards are too high, or my resume had some typos, or something. Or I could be one of those people who believes they deserve better than they actually should get--but I doubt that. :-)

    Not to name names too much, but at Ars Digita, which until recently had a fairly aggressive recruitment policy, there are no openings [arsdigita.com] for development engineers at the moment. Granted, they are in web development, but a shortage of openings there and at related companies must be having some kind of effect on the job market overall...

    just my 0.02...

  • Just as most startups fail so does the dot com world. Its just a bit more dramatic this time.

    Just smile. The pain is normal.

  • A very interesting read. We see two ends of the spectrum here. On one end we have ridiculous business models that realistically were never going to make any money. They were fueled by venture capital guys that were greedy (serves them right). Their whole deal was to make millions from suckers after an IPO. Unfortunately, once the emporor's clothes were examined there was nothing there.

    On the other end of the spectrum we have the more traditional business models. Or maybe it's 'model' singular. The pervasive belief that the Internet would grow to be nothing more than an alternate form of television or newspapers. Thus, you could make a ton of money by advertising. NOBODY likes internet advertising except for companies doing it like DoubleClick, the ever-clue-phucked AOL users (who have no idea what the real Internet is capable of) and site operators who actually depend on advertising revenues to stay afloat (nice knowing you - see you around - if you thought that was sustainable you should be flipping burgers somewhere). The latter are probably going to be the next sites to fold up their tents and go home. It has been said that the Internet treats censorship as a fault and tends to route around it. The same is true for advertising. There are a ton of programs available that let users bypass those annoying banner ads. That model was never going to work, either. I hope DoubleClick gets their asses handed to them on a silver platter and that apparently is about to happen. The sooner the better, IMO. Their earnings problem will send their stock dropping faster than Wile E. Coyote off the edge of a cliff holding onto a ten-ton boulder. In fact, aren't there now reports floating around that web-based advertising is an across-the-board failure?

    The upshot of all this is the Internet is neither television, nor radio, nor print media The true value of the Internet has yet to be realized. The really innovative and workable business models have not been invented yet. They lie somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum, with the truly far-fetched no-effort bullshit sucker IPO mentality on one end and the traditional advertising revenue stream models on the other. With all that being said, however, this phase we're now nearing the end of was inevitable. A necessary part of evolution and ultimately survival of the fittest. At long last we're seeing the unequivocally "good" result that these flawed models are being flushed out of the system once they're shown to be total garbage. My only regret is that I never cashed in on my idea for the Internet pooper-scooper. I probably could have sold that concept to some clueless VC guys 2 or 3 years ago and then I would be sitting pretty.
  • I guess you didn't read the part where it said he had 290,000 options. Admittedly, they aren't worth anything, but that's the tradeoff a lot of people make. Lower salary, more options. Say pseudo.com did take off and he was able to exercise at a price that got him $10/share. Even after taxes, he'd be doing much better than pretty much any salaried job. I guess compared to him, you would be the chump.
  • Ha! I think I know who you are! Place I just left is still hiring people, but has developers sitting around doing nothing. Management doesn't seem to realize that the productivity problems of their engineering department may have something to do with management having no idea what they want to do or how to do it.
  • Hehe. Oh believe it. I'm not going to say how long its been since I wrote any serious code out of embarassment about what I was willing to tolerate for some very valuable stock options. You seriously overestimate the competence of new media managemers.

  • Ah, yes, the shameless promotion. I put GNU in there because "working in free software" wouldn't fit. ;-)

    I'm looking for someone who is local in Boston, starting out at part-time, to do some Debian GNU/Linux (and, sometimes, RH) hacking and a few other business-oriented things. Basically, I'm severely overworked and need a partner in kr1m3 to lend a hand in a lot of different areas. Even if you can offer help as a consultant, that would be cool.

    If you're interested, please drop me a line. Many thanks.

  • Hmmm...I'd not thought about the bulge in population as a factor. I flew off the handle, assuming things I shouldn't have. My sincere apologies.

  • Oh yeah, and like you never make typos... Perhaps I was so swept up by the discussion... ;-)
  • The company I just left just did this. No one at the top was materially affected by the fact that we lost a round of investment money. Fifteen percent of my peers were canned, and everyone's bonuses were canceled (they only reason, btw, that I stayed past July).

    Did the management who were fucking up get their overinflated salaries cut? No. But it looks like they're considering killing off my entire office, even though we were doing about 75% of their actual R&D. All they see is a bunch of 'whiners'.

    Hell yes, we're whining. We're whining because you guys have your heads up your asses, and you haven't bothered to send people from the head office to find out what our concerns are (or rather, you didn't until after the layoffs started). OF COURSE we're going to bitch about it.



    -
  • Email me your resume, and work from home.

    Perl skills a must.

    On-line references preferred (i.e., links to web sites or open source/free software projects you've worked on).
    --

  • While you may have a valid point, to say that is the SOLE reason these companies are going under is verging on moronic.

    Your Al Gore-like hyperbole only serves to discount the message you're trying to convey.

    As far as your personal attack on me (I'm assuming that's not your sig), go fuck yourself. I was attempting to be helpful.

    --

  • For the past year or so, I've been doing consulting work. This is the best time to do it... all these dot-coms flush with money, looking for a place to spend it. I've mostly been working as a sub-contractor for another consulting company, which means I don't have to do my own marketing. Although my hourly rate is bit lower, they can fill my pipeline with as much work as I want.

    As for benefits, I would recommend anyone who wants to do this to wrap themselves in a sub-S corporation (Oh no! Not an evil corporation!). You can set up medical plans, 401Ks, even profit sharing plans. My accountant has said the latter are actually better than 401Ks for tax-deferring savings. He is supposed to give me the details in a few weeks. I don't pretend to understand tax policies (and don't want to).


    --

  • The tech industry is everywhere. Why work at a Dot Com when you can do your wizz-bang computer stuff elsewhere? Even if you work at a sleezy bar, they may well be willing to pay you to set up a good computer accounting system, a website, or something else.

    I like that point a lot, and just want to echo my sentiments. I worked as a sysadmin for a year for a nonprofit organization -- I worked with fantastic, passionate people, got to do lots of fun tech work, and made enough money (not dot.com style cash, but not dot.com style hours, either).

    Now I'm in grad school, doing occasional tech stuff, and I only occasionally feel envious of my college buddies who are off at startups. I can do the tech stuff I like and enjoy, without the pressure of the Technology Scene.

    -schussat

  • That reminds me of a recent web design interview at a moderately sized bank chain. The job announcement was prepared by Human Resources and specified that the web designer needed experience with a 10-key adding machine, algebra and geometry, and a lot of other weirdness.

    At the interview, I was not asked a single question pertaining to web design or my skills! (example: "Where do you see the Internet in five years?") The interviewer - a techie himself - was fumbling for questions. Who knows if he even looked at my portfolio. I didn't have to turn them down, because they hired internally - a programmer with no design experience. Go figure.

  • You're right on the money to be bullish on this technology. The web has changed almost every significant business in America, and created some serious new ones. There's no going back, and the demand for talent, capital, and equipment is going to continue to rise.

    This downturn could turn into a recession that lasts two-three years - during that time most investors will be scared off of the tech market. Those who stay long in this market are going to reap huge rewards.

    This is just a bump on the road to a tech-dominated economy.

  • I think some of these dot-com startups go into the industry with their hopes up just a little too high. Maybe they didn't think of the possiblity of FAILING!

    If you're gonna make it in the real world you got to have your basic strategies plotted out and for God's sake if you are going to go with a Plan have a backup Plan ... THE BASICS PEOPLE! THINK!
  • Similar layoffs are happening in Chicago (admittedly not so many Dot Coms there) and Los Angeles... the last three companies I worked for are either dead or dying, and the one I currently work for is well on its way. Each time a company seems like it has a good strategy during the interview (In one case the company actually did), it either turns out to be so much bullshit or the company management manages to bollocks it up.

    Each one has been fucked in its own special way, which just goes to show that there's more than one way to unsuccessfully skin a cat. It will be nice when the rubble settles, though; the companies that last will hopefully be the well managed ones that provide usable, valuable services... and people will have to know a little bit more than Dreamweaver/Fireworks to get hired as Web Designers/Developers.
  • Now *this* kinda worries me. A lot of companies depend on banner ads to make their revenue. My company s one of them (though I hope in my case it isn't very serious - we run local newspaper websits that get 2-3 million page views a day for at least half of them, so I hope we'll remain attractive to advertisers). I have no time for a sig.
  • I for one am SICK of the acronym IPO. That seems to be the sole goal of a lot of owners of tech companies. I'm slowly developing a niche market site in my own time. It is a large niche however. I have no intention of taking it to an IPO.

    If it does well, as sole stockholder of the corporation, I will reap all the rewards. If not, oh well. I'm not doing it to make a quick buck and disappear; I'm doing it because I have worked in publishing for a long time, it is something I truly enjoy, and this is a lot cheaper to start than publishing on paper!

  • Re:Shouldn't you do that with any company? (Score:3)

    by flieghund ( 31725 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @06:09AM (#669084) Homepage

    Partially a reply to the parent, partially a reply to the AC post that will probably be modded down:

    Like the poor employee could really answer this truthfully. If he works in a crappy company and says that his boss is a total bastard, he'll get punished for it.

    I have found two ways to deal with this (very real) issue: First, you can go ahead and ask the "poor employee" and watch for his/her body language. Does she pause before answering? Does she get nervous? Stop making eye contact with you? Lower her voice? Suddenly become busy? Or does she answer immediately, confidently, and maintain eye contact? Body language can say more than her politically-correct response.

    If you can't interview other imployees during your own interview/tour (not always an option -- one place I interviewed, I only experienced the lobby and the first conference room off of it), see if you can get the name(s) of other employees working there. A few hours/days after your interview, call the company and ask to speak to ($nameOfEmployee). Depending on your "feel" of the company, you can either be straightforward ("Hi, my name is So-and-so, and I interviewed at Company X a few days back, and I was wondering what you thought about your company..."), or you can be secretive ("Hi, you don't know me, but I'm considering working for your company. I know the environment might be sensitive, so you can just answer me 'yes' or 'no,' okay?...").

    Admittedly, sometimes neither option is available. Then you have to rely on other sources, such as investor information (check SEC filings if it is publicly traded or about to be).

    But for the love of Mike, don't walk into a company blind. It is quite literally like walking across the Interstate with a paper sack over your head.

  • ...options aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Having been through two dot-coms already this year, and seeing people take options in lieu of money (for part-time or contract work), all I can do is shake my head. Opening the year at $48/share is all well and good, but here we are nearing year's end and our stock is at 70 *cents*.

    I'm seeing the dot com I'm working for now going down...slowly, maybe, but definitely sinking. I'm all for working for a 'traditional' company next time around - sure, the pay isn't cutting-edge and the technology may not be, either, but they have different values themselves. Training, for one, and a long employee lifespan...it used to be that 10-15 years at a company was considered good...in the dot-com world, 2 years is an accomplishment.

  • Naivety never pays... (Score:3)

    by andymac ( 82298 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @11:23AM (#669086) Homepage

    I am a founder and principle in a company that provides qaulity assurance consulting and outsourced testing services to North American companies. And having worked with companies all over the continent, what's happening in NY is happening everywhere...

    We have done a lot of work with a huge variety of companies including many dot.coms. Some of the business management and technical management practices I have personally seen have both amazed and disgusted me. New office space = party. Sure, it's great to have a party for your clients, associates and friends. But why on earth would you spend upwards of $25K on a party?!? That's 5 to 10 employee salaries for the month. Maybe that's your rent cost. How do you explain to the 7 employees you lay off next month tht you can't afford their salaries because you had a party? If the company was a brokerage firm or any other comparable service firm, would you have spent a similar amount on your opening party? Having a great culture for your employees is important, but it can't be all consuming. Your employees don't care one whit if you buy them a hot tub if it means laying a couple off next month or bleeding money until you have to lay them all off...

    We have been asked by prospective clients to perform work for lower rates and pre IPO stock options. These clients have little to no money to spend on our services. One question we always ask these dot.coms when they solicit our services is "how do you make money?" If they say "banner advertising on our site" or something analagous to BS [urban75.com], we blow them off. Not nice to say, but we're trying to improve the quality of their products and services while growing and building our own service company, not make their bottom line for the quarter look good enough to justify buying a big screen TV and SPS2.

    The technical comptence of some of the programmers and designers that work at these firms is appalling. I have met "senior internet developers" who were being billed out at over $150US/hr whose code looked like it was written by a 2nd year CompSci student. I haven't coded in over 5 years, and even I could find huge gaping holes in their stuff. I am constantly amazed that some people survive in this industry, that there isn't greater accountability. One dot.com I know who laid off some people recently, including their lead developer, were forced to hire him back on because no one could decipher his code. Amazing, but spaghetti coding is making a comeback...

    A side issue: asking about hours *actually* worked compared to salary is always a good idea. I see many web dev firms that pay people a pretty good salary, give them free coffee/pop/etc., buy them meals 2-5 times a week, send them to Mexico for week-long vacations as a "bonus" for meeting deadlines but do not pay out overtime or allow people to bank their hours and take them off later. These people think "wow, I make $70K a year, and I get all this free stuff" but it's the employer who's getting the great deal here: they get you to work 18hr days 6 days a week and don't have to pay you an extra cent (or any extra related taxes).

    Getting involved, either as a service provider for a dot.com, or as an employee for one, you have to be responsible for your choices. If you only care about money in the short term, then go ahead and take your chances. But don't be surprised if people can sense that you carry the negative cachet of having worked at or with a failed dot.com...

    Remember that for many people, it's not about the money. It's about building something you believe in, something to which you can point and proudly say "I did that." Coolness only means so much if you disappear from the high-tech landscape after 5 years... without a trace.

  • As per your Monster.com responses:

    I think a high degree of Monster.com responses can be misleading. Many, many places search for the word "Java" and send e-mail out to people blindly. ie. many of those responses are worthless, they mean nothing. How many of those are going to translate into job offers even near your range of acceptability? Very few. And you're going to waste a lot of time talking to all those headhunters and so forth (most Monster.com e-mails come from startups, from my experience). And most of those headhunters will want to MEET you before they send your resume out to the 1-2 companies looking for java developers they have lined up.

    I'm saying all of this because the same thing happened to me - I got a ton of Monster.com mails, and 99% of them were junk. Some of them I had to waste a lot of time with before realizing they were junk. One interview I went on solely for the fact that it was obvious that the person had actually read my resume - after being flooded with junk it was a good sign (when I went to the scheduled interview, the guy didn't show up and an HR flunky interviewed me, oh well).

  • It's about getting big fast, not screwing people. (Score:4)

    by dunster ( 66386 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @11:28AM (#669088) Homepage
    You talk about VC and IPOs as if it were about separating a fool from his money. The people with this money are not fools. They do it knowing full well what they are getting into.

    The VC/IPO route is a way to get big, fast. The Internet is the Wild West. It's a land grab. Run out to the territory, stake it out, own it. If the land you grabbed has enough revenue in it, you make a killing. The richer the land you grab, the richer you get. You can argue that the land these companies have grabbed isn't worth as much as they think, and in many cases you are right. Some of these cases, however, are going to simply mint money. There is money to be made selling things on the web.

    These people who invest their money look at a company's prospects first. They estimate the worth of the territory and the costs associated with growing the company. They make an educated decision to buy or sell. Thankfully, there is no law like the one you describe. Investors don't need you to protect them. They know how to make their own decisions.

    These people are not trying to inflate the values of their companies and then jump out of the plane. They are trying to grow their company fast, to take more territory and discourage competitors. They don't leave when it is done; they grow it even bigger, just more slowly.
  • Personally, I know of no IT company anywhere working on Internet-related technologies that isn't massively overstretching its skilled workforce just trying to keep up with the explosion. Managers abound, but techies are working 90-hour weeks more often than they would wish.

    What downturn? I can't believe that NY inhabits a different universe to the rest of the planet. Perhaps the author was just working for a dead company.

    The fact that many companies are not making money is easy to believe, simply because business managers still don't actually understand the Internet, despite their 5-year "long term Internet expertise" (ha ha, the newbies). But techies sitting around twiddling their thumbs? That seems unlikely, unless the business model underlying the company was seriously flawed right from the start.

    If you're twiddling your thumbs in NY and you're really competent technically, then come to Europe, and specifically the UK. We need you.

    [And you wouldn't believe the rates that contract agencies are offering!]
  • not true... our customer base is at a record high even if the stock price isn't...
  • Like no one except those born 1945-1959 ever wanted quick profits? Like me and thee will somehow be magically invulnerable to waking up at 55 with $2000, just because we've watched someone else make mistakes planning their retirement?

    Booms have always happened. Crashes have always happened. They always will. You and I are just as likely to be caught up in them as anyone else.

    (OT, I know, but this "boomers are so stupid and I'm so smart" BS bugs me.)

  • Absolutely. I would also advise paying close attention to the interview process itself, and how the company tries to make itself attractive to you. First, look carefully at how they are trying to evaluate you. Are they asking tough questions? Have they thought about what kind of employee they are looking for, and how to evaluate them? Are they focusing on quality more than quantity? Selecting employees is a very critical and difficult thing, and a company that is not dead serious about it is doomed. Second, does it look like the company is just interested in "ramping-up" to please a VC? Is the company's pitch something like: "our goal is to have 200 people by the end of the year and then IPO"? Or is it: "our goal is to solve problem X for N customers by the end of the year, and thus make $Y in revenues. To do that, we need 20-25 great people and we plan to grow at a rate commensurate with our ability to absorb them into our team." The latter sounds less sexy, but it's a good sign that the company is there for the long term. The problem is that many companies use headcount as an end in itself, rather than the means to the end. Often, this is simply because that is how VCs measure their companies, and entrepreneurs are under constant pressure to please the VC. It may be good for the VCs, because they are spreading their bets across many companies, and having a quick measure like headcount is more efficient than spending hundreds of hours following the company's fundamentals. This results in companies ramping-up impressively, and then finding a cliff at the end of the ramp: no cash, no revenues, and the VC herd has moved on to the next fad. Finally, of course, you should always think of the business itself, and convince yourself of the fundamental value that it provides to society. If you get positive answers to all of the above, then you may have found a good startup, and a far greater opportunity to build something good, make a meaningful and lasting contribution, than you could working as a corporate drone in cubicle land. -nemo- Shameless plug: if all this makes sense to you, visit . We are looking for a few great programmers who are smart, and get things done! [invisiblehand.net]
  • Sorry about the lame formatting on the previous post. As a long-time lurker, and first-time poster, I didn't think of putting in the paragraph breaks in html...

  • Hmm. So here's the receipe for certain DOT COM failure:

    • Get lame idea.
    • Cultivate lame idea as the 'next great thing'.
    • Convince idiot VCs to give you money, even though your idea is lame and your business plan is to fund the drug habits of your loser employees.
    • Cash check.
    • Party.
    • Pat yourself on the back because you 'made it'.
    • Hire a bunch of high school drop outs / stoners.
    • Let them smoke pot on the job.
    • Let them surf porn all day on the job.
    • Act astonished when the company goes bankrupt.

    I am glad the rest of us with real jobs are paying for the unemployment benefits of Mr. Art Boy. Maybe he should have laid off the pot and learned a real skill. Oh, but we're GEN X, so we are entitled to high pay, aren't we?

    "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."

  • One of my Boston area Monster.com responses was from a headhunter looking for "six years experience with Java". (Is Jim Gosling looking for work?)
  • I agree, having just read "The E-myth Revisited" [amazon.com] by Michael Gerber.
    There the point of three personality types needed to run a business is emphasised quite heavily.
    The book is a great read for anyone thinking of starting a company, and those in their own company now.
  • This doesn't mean that Silicon Startups are doomed, it just means that they need to be a bit more careful in their planning and in their long-term plans. While it is true that some startups make millions, it's only because they do the right thing, with the right planning, at the right time. So, if the tech people are more discerning about who they work for, then this will force startups to make themselves look good for the long term.

    --
    Lawrence
    We now return you to your regularly scheduled chaos.

  • Welcome to Silicon Alley (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have worked at 4 dot.coms in NYC over the past 3 years. One is now extinct and the 3 others are on life support (2 of the firms having 300-1000 employees in several cities around the country/world). It is amazing that in this day and age some fools think they can "grow" their way out of poor management and high debt. Folks seem to have forgotten that ultimately a company that cannot make money won't float.

    But hey, it sure looks cool when someone with a degree in fine arts can boast about an office in Bombay or Sydney. I suspect it won't be so cool when the firms implode and shareholder/lender lawsuits ensue.

    Party on, Garth!

  • NEVER work a SINGLE DAY after not getting paid on pay day ON-TIME. ever, Ever, EVER! (sigh)

  • Shouldn't you do that with any company? (Score:4)

    by sinnergy ( 4787 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:22AM (#669100) Homepage
    Isn't it good to ask those kinds of questions for any company that you plan on working for? A basic tenet of job hunting and career building is also using the interview process to your own advantage by taking the company to task, especially after the first couple of interviews.

    Asking the right questions and really getting to know the company and some of the employees is essential. If you have the time to actually pull a few employees aside during a whole-company "tour" before they put the offer on the table, make sure you have some to-the-point and quick questions that have concise answers. These questions can then hopefully give you a good sense of whether or not the people currently at the company feel it's going somewhere or not. Questions like, "On average, how many hours a week are you working here?", "Is your boss reasonable and easy to deal with?", "Have there been any recent lay-offs?" can really help to set things straight. Of course, if you can find ways to ask those and perhaps be a little more subtle than go for it.

    In fact, I'd argue that any company that doesn't let you talk to some of you just might be working with, it's time to start getting worried.

    Remember, we are in demand right now. For your own career and well-being, please do your homework before signing the big money contract because, lo and behold, the big money contract doesn't mean much when you're on the street without a job, or at a company that's poorly manage.

  • My first week.. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first week I started at my company I was so bored, no work no training ..nothing!
    So I complained and was told the following:

    "..your being paid aren't you? Don't rock the boat."

    Maybe thats why our share price has dropped by over 80% in the last six months.

  • It is my sig, and there was no personal attack on you.

    But here's one: get a clue.

  • Companies have been going belly-up for quite a while, the media is just figuring it out now because of the downturn in the stock market. You should have been looking at prospective employers with a discerning eye ever since the startup boom happened. I have seen more flawed business models in the last 3 years than I have seen in the rest of my life. I realize that the stock options and environment can be exciting, but most companies (I believe something like 8 out of 10 IPOs) will have their stock price settle below their IPO asking price. Stock options don't look so attractive then. When you are searching for a job, of course you should evaluate the company's chance of being a success. I think it should be a large part of your final employment decision.


    Enigma
  • As a lazy new yorker who spent some years in Seattle, I couldn't agree more. I found that, for the most part, Seattle had a higher quality of techies than NYC. As far as Israel is concerned, though, I couldn't *disagree* more.
  • Maybe it's worth it for some of these dot com startups to create ventures together in order to utilize resources as well a brain power.

    A lot of dot com startups have excellent ideas but often don't have the business world know how, are on a shoe string budgets.

    I think it would be worth it for some of these guys to knock their heads together to create some real KILLER dot coms that may actually do something beneficial to humanity with their ideas!
  • Some of these .com's like pseudo had pretty good ideas, just too early. Maybe in a decade or so when every home has a fiber line to support the required bandwith. Who wants to watch a shoe that's 2" by 2"? Others I still can't understand. Somebody thought they can run a website or do something with the Internet. They get milions of $$$, but have no plans to make a profit. Wall St bids their stock to unimaginable prices, and finally this year reality set in. Peter Lynch must be laughing everytime he watches CNBC.

  • And the bottom drops out... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The worst is yet to come, because a whole lot more .coms are built on the same flawed business models as the corporate corpses on f*ckedcompany. What I see happening is that the viable, innovative etailers and B2Bz will continue to be absorbed or coopted by the big boys, and the rest will simply die. What's really going to hurt is when all these so-called web developers hit the real IT job market and discover there's more to programming than cute spinning logos and cut+paste html tags.
  • Have the high-tech startups beocme the get-rich-quick idea of the 10's decade. The problem with so many of these business is they are decent or really good ideas but, their business plans are written to please some venture capitalists and dont focus on long term reality. IMHO anyway

  • Far too many .coms use the IPO business model. (Score:4)

    by Maul ( 83993 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:25AM (#669109) Journal
    Unfortunately, too many .com businesses are using a business model that focuses primarily on gaining venture capital until they are able to go public. Then the idea is that everyone sells out of the company and gets rich, and until then, it is perfectly OK to lose money.

    This is a pretty pathetic business model, if you ask me. Is it so desireable to become filthy rich that you screw over your employees and investors? Is it okay to create a company that you know is doomed to fail within a year after it goes public?

    The current laws prevent people from selling out right after IPO, but perhaps it should be lengthened even more for the top shareholders, just so that this model becomes undesireable.

  • Startups (Score:5)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @06:12AM (#669110) Homepage Journal
    You need three people to have a successful startup:

    1) A "Visionary"

    2) Someone with technical know-how

    3) Someone with business sense.

    This isn't unique to dot-coms. It is true for any sort of startup.

    Apple, for example, had Woz (2) and Jobs (1 and 3).

    Most of the dot-coms that go under have a (1), some have a (2), and few, if any, have a (3). That's why they fail. And the truth is, the earlier they fail, the better, because the bigger they get, the more investor money will vaporize and the more people they'll throw out of work.

    For some reason, dot-coms got a free pass over the last few years, which is unfortunate. It is fortunate that this now seems to be ending because the dot-coms that do survive will be the worthwhile ones.

    This is not very helpful to someone out of a job, I know. I've been thrown out of work when working for a (non-dot-com) startup as well. So take it as a learning experience, and when you look for your next job, look for Mr. (1), Ms. (2) and Mrs. (3). Because there are some dot-coms out there that will succeed.

    In the '80s, there were a lot of young, hi-tech startups, too. I had the misfortune of picking two that failed. One had only a (1) and the other had only a (3). Other people picking startups in the same era ended up getting in early on Dell or Oracle.

    There Dells and Oracles right now. But there are 10,000 dot-coms and there can only be a couple huge sucesses.
  • I think part of the problem is that a lot of the dotcoms really don't have any services to provide. They're either portals or some other similar piece of crap. The websites which actaully have hard/soft(ware) services behind them (i.e. something to sell) are the ones that typlically survive.

    Also, has anybody stopped and checked to see how many regular business startups have flopped in the same amount of time? That'd be an intersting comparison to see if regular business startups flop more/less than dot coms.

  • Tidbits from Boston (Score:4)

    by neuronaut ( 167967 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @06:21AM (#669112)
    As a programmer with about 2 years of experience plus a master's degree now, I thought it would be easy to find work in the Boston area. But a lot of HR departments sound really busy right now, and I'm wondering if the .com fallout is affecting things. Some stories I've picked up over the past few weeks:

    Two consulting companies which friends of mine work or worked for have each laid off web development people in the triple digits within the past month. I believe that in both cases, this included programmers. My roommate's company, which is exclusively devoted to web development, has put a hiring freeze on programmers.

    A fourth company I know of is suffering from lost business, because even though big corporations still want good websites, with the .coms failing, there is less pressure on them to get them out there. So there will be business in the next 2-3 years for web development from the big companies, but it won't match the boom we've already had.

    If this is the anecdotal evidence I have on hand, it makes me wonder how bad the overall scene is. I think that the HR departments for "solid" tech companies must be getting swamped with resumes from all the people losing work from the .coms. If I weren't looking for work at the same time, I would find it merely interesting...

  • The problem with so many of these business is they are decent or really good ideas but, their business plans are written to please some venture capitalists and dont focus on long term reality.

    In actuality, i don't think than many of the dotcoms were good ideas to start out with. Especially the whole ecommerce crew. They sprang to life and prospered for a time only because the company's whose products they were selling took their time embracing the internet. But once it was realized that there was money to be made, and that money was going to the dot coms who essentially stood between the supplier and customer in all the transactions. They just realized that they could do it themselves and then take in the dotcoms revenues as their own and raise their margins...

    Onsale, Outpost, Buy, Shop, Amazon, and there's only hundreds more... Ebay at least enables people to do transactions they could have never done before, where as the the rest moved the middle man from being the cataloger to the dotcom.
  • jamienk,

    Could you please email me. I'm curious who the meticulous company is. It seems implied they may be a medial company. If they are I'm really curious who they are.

    Thanks

  • yeah, what else were you expecting? (Score:3)

    by mlas ( 165698 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @06:37AM (#669115) Homepage
    It utterly baffles me that people are surprised at all about the "decline" of the dotcoms. It is not the Internet industry on the whole that's suffering from the current shake-out, after all, but these ill-conceived, hastily assembled and often appallingy naive young corporations that all jumped in the pool at the same time.

    pseudo.com is an interesting story, but don't call them a victim of the dotcom backlash... they got $15 million in funding and by all accounts ran a crash-pad for slackers, hackers, artists and assorted counterculture types, all the while putting out the odd piece of web-based entertaintment, until the cash ran out. Then they closed their doors. Surprise? Hell no. I say good for them, personally. Wish I'd pulled off that hack. But they hardly count as a failed company. I don't get the sense they ever really wanted to be a company. Andy Warhol's Factory is the comparison I've heard more than once.

    Any company that thinks that the Internet economy has invalidated the terms "profit" and "return on investment" will of course wake up fast.

    I consider myself part of the whole dotcom thing-- I consult in NYC on web design and programming, and I'm still turning down about 5 job offers a week. I just took a position with a design firm that focuses on top-flight clients, thinks internationally, and has a realistic business plan. I don't fear for my future.

    Six months ago, we had one young woman who joined us, and spent most of the day chatting on the web with friends, arriving late and leaving early. When confronted about her slacking, she actually said, "It's the New Economy! Hours are flexible!" She was fired two weeks later.

    The dotcoms that are going under are much like her, thinking that the New Economy rules mean that they can do whatever they want and still exist. But the new rules are really just a slight (albeit revolutionally important) modification to the old rules. Y'know, the ones where companies make money.

    The sick and the weak go first, and I for one won't miss 'em.

  • Terms of most (if not all) IPOs includes not being able to sell your shares prior to a designated period of time. VCs and Investment Bankers will just have to extend this period of time to 3 or 4 years. That way, most executives of start-ups will be forced to stay with the company and not screw over anyone over during the 3-4 years.
  • Starving artist is New York, there is a news story. People have to understand that just because they work in a building with computers, and they know how to use a keyboard, it does not necessarily make them a 'tech worker'.

    Let see a show of hands of all the UNIX wizards with strong WAN skills out of work in New York, or San Fran, DC, Austin Texas?

    all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut

  • Re:Silicon Alley is a techie desert (Score:3)

    by tjb ( 226873 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @08:23AM (#669118)
    So where's the nearest techie oasis? Believe it or not, central New Jersey. The legacy of the Bell System, and the huge Bell Labs installations here, has created a seed of talent not often seen outside Silicon Valley. I have friends at half a dozen startups founded here, and several more at companies based in the West Coast but opening offices here to take advantage of the great people. Ten minutes to the east is the Atlantic Ocean; fifteen to the west, horse farms. If you hate surburbs, forget it; if you like them, it's wonderful. Real estate, both residential and commercial, is relatively inexpensive, especially compared to the Valley or the Alley. As an employee of one of those Central NJ startups, I have to say you are absolutely correct about it being a techie haven. However, its very unlike the dot-com industry. These Central NJ companies spawned by Lucent and good old 'T' are hardcore engineering firms that produce real products, not internet based dot-coms that provide a service. These NJ companies are filled with Electrical Engineers, DSP gurus, and low-level system programmers, not the new style geeks who feed themselves with a steady diet of Perl, HTML, and Java. These NJ companies are headed by Chief Officers with years of experience and proven track records, not some 23 year old that decided to start up a business. In other words, there is a world of difference between Silicon (V)Alley and these NJ companies. This isn't a bad thing! I get to hack hardware all day long, my hours are usually pretty reasonable, I wear whatever I want, and - get this - we actually turn a profit! --Tim

  • Market Psychology (Score:3)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @06:42AM (#669119)
    Here's what drove the "dot com" boom. Aside from considerations of greed, there was something else.

    Most baby boomers have this perception that they're going to be young, beautiful and rich forever. OK maybe they're starting to accept the idea that they're balding and fat, but they don't intend to retire gracefully - they want the big house on the beach while they go swimming in crystal clear blue water, you get the idea.

    In order to have the of retirement lifestyle TV is pushing and that most boomers want, you conservatively need $1-$2 MILLION in reserve. The average boomer is 40-50+ and has on average less than $2000 in the bank.

    So how do you make two million in less than a decade? Buy and hold? NAH! TOO LONG! They thought they'd retire at 55! So out comes the dice to roll on the market. When Netscape blew up people smelt the kind of stratospheric success of a Microsoft. And bought. And bought and bought. And borrowed, traded on margin, and bought. Hey, every one of those stocks rocketed on IPOs. Everyone was going to get rich. Noone wanted to INVEST, they wanted to SPECULATE - who cares if the company's a money loser - the stock's going to skyrocket, and someone's going to get rich. So long as I catch the upside, someone else'll be stuck with the tab on the downswing.

    Well, thinks Mr. Boomer, I bought at $35, it's now at $100, time to harvest the profits and stick them into something a little more blue chip. Either that, or employee whose options have vested decides to cash out. Net result - more supply than demand, price goes down, people panic, sell etc.

    You want to know when this'll happen again? When the boomers start hitting 60, STILL only have less than $2000 in the bank, Social Security is all but bankrupt, and the first biotech stock hits $100 in its first hour of trading. Mass panic and desperation will fuel yet another boom.
  • what are you trying to say?
    BSCS due in May 2001
    looking for work after graduation
    Know Java & C
    randysmith101@hotmail.com
  • No, I'm not saying any of what you just said. What I have said, though, is that there is a huge wad of people with unreasonable expectations (retiring with a full head of gray hair, perfect eyesight and hearing at 55 at a beach house somewhere exotic with 10 miles of private beach - see commercials for details) frantically scrambling for money.

    I'm sure when I get to 55 28 years from now I and my colleagues will be doing the same thing - but we won't be a huge enough population mass to do that to the stock market.

    My 18 year old brother, himself a member of another baby boom, and/or the people born in 2000 (a third baby boom) will do the same things at their respective ages, and they'll have the mass of people to do it.

    I'm starting to invest (a bit late, mind you) because I don't want to be in that trip, but for now making that kind of money is a want, not a need.

    I don't have the psychology of "oh crap, I don't want to be eating dog food in ten years, GO STOCKS GO!"
  • I second this.

    The last couple of years I've been contracting at various startups; and while I was paid well enough the managers would allways try to entice me to come on with the offer of options. One place even managed to go public and made some people rich for a short while (till the market recently shot down their stock price). Point being, I'm glad I'm to cynical to take a chance on someone else's questionable leadership and business skills because now I've got good money in the bank and alot of people I used to work for are out of work with worthless option paperwork and years lost to being overworked and underpaid.

    Regardless of industry, for every one sucessfull startup that reaches profitability there are nine that failed. And for my personality it's better to have cash in the bank than lottery tickets.

    -- Greg

  • Unfortunatly, with the job market as it is, all of the companies are hungry for warm bodies.

    I'll be graduating from college this year, and the interview process has begun. I would say that in ninety percent of my interviews, I am able to turn the interview around, and instead of them interviewing me about why I'm good for their company, I'm interviewing them, trying to figure out why I should work for them. I'm able to even do this with the non HR types. The end result is that I leave an interview with a sense that they don't care who they hire.

    Does anyone have a company out there that isn't hurting for people?
  • Hey, I work for BigStar entertainment. Don't believe everything you read... Life isn't that miserable! We have learned a lot in the recent months, both about the technology and about the nature of our business.

    While it is really sad to see a large small-company downsize and "buckle down" for tough days ahead (it's harder to get investor money now for e-commerce).. it really isn't so bad. We only kept the most talented of people, cut the fat, and sort of prepared for a few tough months without funding. The BigStar website is now actually not LOSING money (granted I'm not sure if it's making money YET.. but read on and see why I think it will--and most importantly.. it isn't BURNING CASH LIKE IT USED TO). There's some great software that we built, state of the art and all--the site pretty much runs itself. We have perl scripts that auto-generate content from muze and from our vendors, we auto-submit orders to the fulfillment houses, and it basically takes a skeleton crew to run this multi-million-dollar website!

    At this rate, I really think it will prove to be a profitable enterprise.. and all with ZERO marketing expense.

    If anything, maybe all of this will teach people that the internet is unlike any other industry. You don't need to throw hundreds of bodies or millions of dollars at a problem in order to get it solved. All you need is to get the computers to do it for you. Hire some talented and ingenious programmers, and set things up so the computers run the show. That's what the internet is about. Automation. The most popular things on this great Internet don't need much manual intervention. Like usenet.. or slashdot.. or irc.. etc..

    You wouldn't believe how many web sites, despite the relatively techincal industry that they are in, are run in a very old-fashioned and inefficient way! Dozens of bodies are thrown at tasks that really only require someone to write a few programs and think things through. I can think of DOZENS of things that we thought we needed people to do at BigStar, and finally when we had to downsize, we got really ingenious and managed to figure out a way to automate 99 percent of them!!

    And another thing.. people leaving a company often offer more junior people a great opportunity. After a bunch of the programmers quit (most of them wanted to go on to bigger and better things where they could get better pre-ipo stock options)... I got to do a lot more of the core programming--I learned quite a bit--and am earning a very decent salary at this "dead" company. (the company is far from dead!)

    The moral: Don't believe what the press is saying. Sometimes a disadvantage can be an advantage! We at BigStar are running essentially the same business much more efficiently at maybe 1/10th the cost of what it used to take us to run this business. That's a great thing!

  • ... and I'm surprised it took this long for investors to start demanding results.

    My current company has just been hit with some of this. I don't think they're doomed yet, but I am alert to the symptoms that I've seen in several doomed companies to date. The biggest problem I find is the controller freakout; if you can avoid or mitigate that, you will delay the onset of doomedness. For example, my corp had a significant LAN outage (5-7 hours of prime working time) due to an 'organically-grown' network infrastructure that finally melted down into massive cascading switch failures. Conservatively, it probably cost our office $250k in billable hours. A solid network with 400 switched ports (+ VLAN, L3, multigigabit backplane, mgmt software, etc.. See Cisco, Avaya, Foundry, etc..) costs about $90k. What figure is easier for a controller to redline?

    I'm thinking that getting insurance against outages (like from Lloyd's or something) would actually help me, since premiums against insuring losses of that magnitude would probably be quite steep, and if you go with a technically-literate insurance firm, I'm sure you'd get discounts for solid switched nets, unix servers, proper backup, security and other procedures..

    Or not.

    Your Working Boy,
  • OK troll, I'll bite.

    He want's to like his work, that's why the hell not.

    Just rob some old ladies or something. They're being stupid and unfit by walking on the same sidewalk as you, right? It's blind rapacious greed that made this country, right?

    Some of us try to live and work ethically. We might hire you after we truly add value to the economy.

    Quit your .com. Shit, join a .org :).
  • The VCs and investment bankers who were bankrolling the .bombs got to sell their shares to a very, very gullible public on the first day. Not a bad return... for every few pennies invested in TheGlobe, you get to sell a share of that worthless pile of shit to Grannie for $360.
  • Apple, for example, had Woz (2) and Jobs (1 and 3).

    Actually, back in the day, Jobs had about zero business sense, other than the sense that Woz's computer might have a market. It was Mike Markukla (sp?) who was the "suit" to go along with the "geek" (Woz) and the "visionary" (Jobs).

    Mike actually hung around on the Apple board until the Great Putsch of 1998, when Jobs retook Apple.

    -jon

  • Ok, let's see: you were a self-styled alcohol-swilling outcast who managed to get employed in a startup which let people smoke marijuana at lunchtime and threw big parties in which everybody snorted crack and got money thrown at them by suits. And you expected this to last *how* long?

    Does anybody else working in a non-marijuana-smoking-cocaine-snorting-party-throw ing company think that this tale is a bit removed from reality? I don't sit at my keyboard thinking "You know, they don't let me smoke marijuana here, or live under my desk...I feel cheated".
  • You wrote:

    "Anyone with a few years experience who is working full-time on Wall Street and is not in management is a fool, who usually has what I call a "martyr complex", or an H1-B, who is basically an indentured servant for the company."

    Really? That is certainly some interesting arithmetic you use! The ratio of management to those they manage must be very close to 1:1, according to you, since all those engineers are moving into management; or at least that must be implied from your statement above.

    Or perhaps the percentage of "fools," "martyrs" and H1B is just very, very high?

    Or perhaps you are a paid shill for the software industry? I doubt you are an engineer, or one worth a damm, considering your apparent illnumeracy.
    BSCS due in May 2001
    looking for work after graduation
    Know Java & C
    randysmith101@hotmail.com

  • flawed as in making money?
  • I mean in the sense that biotech becomes the "Dot Com" of about five years from now.

    You could have invested in any of a number of internet, Linux and/or computer companies prior to 1999...
  • The bulge in population ABSOLUTELY is a factor. In fact, it's almost the only one. Populations do the same thing over and over again. The supposed Gen X crowd (actually Gen 13) actually mirrors the generation following WWII to a T (what's referred to as the Silver Fox generation) - while the Baby Boomers and Gen Y/Millennials/Atari Generation (the following one to "Gen X") are nearly identical - but all of them go through the same cycles, it's just that certain ones (e.g. teen culture in the 60s vs teen culture in the early to mid 80s) are considered to have more of an impact and be more memorable simply because there were more around and more people to remember them. As I said again, whatever the Boomers do just by sheer weight of numbers will have an impact.

    No need to apologise: I guess what I was saying was unclear.

  • My Current Experience with a .com (Score:3)

    by trog ( 6564 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @10:10AM (#669134)

    About a year ago, I decided to leave the company I was working for, and see if I could find a new challange. I shot my resume to Dice.com, and withen a week, had dozens of calls from headhunters and VP of Engineers. I interviewed at five of these companies; all were dot-coms.

    I finally settled on the one that I am in today, and do not regret the decision. My deciding factor was not the whiz-bang technology, nor the hype, but a)My gut-level feeling about my boss (He is the CTO, with over 20 years experience in the field), and b)their business plan. While we continue to have a bit of a burn rate, we started with a solid business plan and a strong management team to develop it.

    The result: I work at a stable dot-com, where I am constantly challenged, that is a market leader in our business area, and is working to be profitable withen the next two years.

    I've never experienced the horror stories that people have eluded to. Yes, we have been "Tightening our Belt" so to speak, but that is simply to avoid becoming a business casuality.

    By the way: Three of the other four companies I interviewed at have sence gone under.

  • Dot Coms (Score:3)

    by GC ( 19160 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:32AM (#669135)
    I work for a company [vignette.com] that develops software and tools for Internet sites. You may be interested to hear that the proportion of our ".com" customers as opposed to "old economy" customers has reduced substantially recently.

    The general consensus in the company is that while many companies will fail, those who turn out to become the leaders in their fields will flourish. It's survival of the fittest out there and you must be very discerning before joining any company.

    Any self-respecting, qualified tech person should consider at least two offers before changing jobs, placing each in their own perspective. It can be difficult to try to juggle three offers and move the interview and selection process along so that you can consider offers simultaneously, but only then can you really make a considered and well judged decision on where your pay cheque should come from.

    Just my 2c

    Aside: How many active users read Slashdot? I see user ids are in their hundreds of thousands now...
  • Well, I can give you a little information from the other side. We've two positions open, and we're actively looking for people.

    We've put ads at several places on the net, including Hotjobs, Dice, and a few NY-area-centric sites.

    By far the majority of resumes we're seeing are not well suited to the positions. For example, we're looking for people experienced (esp. in the case of the senior position) in UNIX technologies. Yet we get resumes of people with nothing but ASP and Front Page. Annoying!

    We're also seeing people with maybe a year or two of experience in the field applying for the senior position.

    Finally, we've put some very specific details in our ads regarding how we'd like to see resumes. Clearly placed on each is "text only". Yet people still send MS Word documents.

    Obviously, I'm not describing all people. But do please recall that those of us hiring have our frustrations too. We're trying very hard to hire other than "warm bodies". And some of us don't have the luxury/curse of an NR department!

  • True. I think though that you'll find that comparison hard to do as the dot com world is a highly scrutnized "young" venture so to speak. Like you said "the websites that actually have hard/soft(ware) sevices behind them are the ones that typically survive." The same goes for the fact that the ones who actually may have backing by some "bigger" more conventional company are the ones that survive. Maybe it's worthwhile for longer standing .coms to foster some of the startups and maybe we'll see less failures in the industry.
  • Even the big fish in the pond, DoubleClick, has announced that its revenues are likely to fall as Internet advertising drops (its stock, of course, has plunged).

    Cool!

    (BTW, use login slashdot1234 and password slashdot123)

    Jacco
    ---
    # cd /var/log

  • Re:And the bottom drops out... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, I know a bunch of "web developers" who think Boolean is an alien language on Star Trek Voyager.

  • POV: Web design company (Score:4)

    by jamienk ( 62492 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:40AM (#669141)
    I work for a smallish web design company in NYC, so I get to see the Internet strategies of a lot of companies. Here are my impressions:

    * Even though the Fucked Companies are many and growing, the web design industry itself is still HUGE and growing. Organic and Razor Fish, etc. seem to have tried too hard to cash in on the Dot Com phenomena, so they may crash a bit. But there are other companies and organizatons, besides Dot Coms, that want websites. All kinds of websites, not just ones that are meant to make billions.

    * The so-called "dot coms" can be either good or bad, depending on the same things any businesses depend on. We have one client that has millions in investment from big venture capital firms and big tech players. But their site (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty) is the worst piece of crap imaginable. Why? Because no one there has any idea that they need a real plan. They hear that "medical sites" are going to be big, so they start a medical site. On the other hand, we have another client who is meticulously trying to do everything the "right" way...with lots of planning, slow steps, aliances, hiring appropriate talent at appropriate moments...they will potentially be big. Not Amazon, but many millions of dollars in revenue.

    * The tech industry is everywhere. Why work at a Dot Com when you can do your wizz-bang computer stuff elsewhere? Even if you work at a sleezy bar, they may well be willing to pay you to set up a good computer accounting system, a website, or something else.

  • Boston seems to still be booming. The only people I know having any difficulty at all finding work are people who had jobs at companies who subsequently realized that they don't have the skills they claim to have.

    The problem in the industry isn't companies going out of business. Its not affecting the availability of jobs. What has happened is that people who were mediocre at best at their jobs are let go, and now companies have realized that to survive in this market its better to have a vacant position that a position filled by the wrong person.

    100% of the people I know who have real skills, whether software, graphic design, web production or whatever else are having no troubles at all finding work.

    Its the people who think they are more qualified than they really are, or the people who believe they deserve things they don't that are having the problem.

    The upside is that pay seems to still be rising for those of us who fall into the former category since there aren't people in the latter leeching off companies as much.
  • I expect web-based mail order shopping will continue to be hit hard because the high fuel costs are causing shipping rates to rise.

    Also, banner ad rates keep falling and big brand advertisers like Coca-Cola and Levis, etc. still don't run adds on the web.

    When we put that up against dotcoms who rent huge, expensive, glitzy office space...


    blessings,

  • You may think 2" by 2" is too small a shoe to be useful, but actually many infants and small children use these shoes.

  • Idiocy begets idiocy (Score:3)

    by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Saturday October 28, 2000 @02:09PM (#669147) Homepage
    The quality of employees in a company have a huge, huge impact on its would-be success, as do some other factors.

    (1) Companies with great people and good business models attract more great people. Generally speaking, the best people in this industry only switch jobs by referral. Unless I switch careers laterally pretty far (say, moving from security work that I do now to, game programming, which I've always thought would be fun), I will never again be 'seeking' a job. I'll just be asking friends who's got the best place to go.

    (2) The inverse is also true. Companies with weak people attract weak people, especially technically. For example, a lot of companies know what they need technically, but they can't find it. They hire consultant after consultant, and they fail again and again because the consultants being pimped out by consulting companies these days are pathetic. Having interviewed a great number, you run across situations where people claim to be 'expert' in Solaris, for example, but can't tell you the simplest things, like, say, where you set name servers for name resolutions, how to turn on ip forwarding, or where you would change a mount point on a drive. Yet, clearly, the companies sent these would-be consultants in thinking we'd hire them. This reflects, in my mind, either an expectation that the interviewing company cannot discern applicants, or an expectation that mediocrity is acceptable to acquire a warm body.

    (3) Making money was just optional for far too long. Too much watery-eyed technochasing, or, in many cases, watery-eyed garbage chasing, was going on. Let's consider our old friend, the CueCat. For those in the industry, how many companies do you know of who's ideas were about as technically deep? And for every one of these fairly-simple ideas that pans out (Hotmail for free email, for example), how many failed? (And here, you could insert a dozen startups doing internet 'briefcases', chat this, doc-share that, etc) Then there's people who seemed to think that anything could be sold online -- UserPaperMacheHotTub.com, etc. All these extra ventures created demand that brought more people into the industry, but too many people (in it and joining it) were underqualified, but able to make good money because people had to hire someone (and then fail, because 'someone' isn't good enough).

    (4) Too much money spent when it wasn't needed. Bruce Perens recently said that programmers were wasting half of their time reinventing the wheel. I've seen this firsthand way too many times. Companies blow tens or hundreds of thousands of VC dollars on solutions to problems that could be solved with a visit to Freshmeat. The problem of overconsumption of technology takes other forms; companies who buy Oracle ASP services when they should have run linux and php, etc.

    (5) The Certification Myth. This is my personal favorite. In one office I've visited, they have a chart up on the wall, showing the number of employees who have various certifications -- CCNA, MCSE, MCP, MCP+I, A+, etc. People place an enormous amount of faith in these certs. At one recent recruiting event, one company was acquiring sysadmins with the following: "Do you have an MCSE?"; if they did, hired; if not, thanks anyhow. Meanwhile, the very best people I know are not certified. They're generally also not college educated. Those who are are educated in other fields (for example, degrees in English, now doing hard core tech work, or even a former lawyer turned techie). Meanwhile, sappy companies hire morons with some letters after their names.

    Again, this sort of ignorance begets the same. The bright people will avoid working for companies that value certs above skills, because why should a truly expert BGP guy work for a company who pays him less and treats him as less senior than a relative fool with a CCIE (although of all the certs, the CCIE has the smallest number of lamers with one).

    All of this is compounded by the fact that some of the best technical people are also those with the least people skills. They recognize their treatment, but they are simply bitter and condescending, and instead of being tapped for their good traits they are relegated to ineffective corners of organizations.

    Overall, its no wonder companies are failing all around. And this is why there IS a shortage of IT workers -- its not that there aren't enough, there just aren't enough good ones. It shouldn't come as a surprise. It's become a real industry. Other real industries have schooling followed by training. They have fellowships or internships that are required, or apprenticeships to reach journeyman level. This isn't the way of the tech field, and thank goodness, because it interferes with the meritocracy that draws such bright people into the field and keeps them there and working hard. But it leads to a bunch of bogus credentials, and the worst are book test based certifications.

  • Uhhh....I work in The Alley as a C++ programmer. What's Pointer Arithmetic?

    It's why C++ was invented, when it was found that the new generation of CSc grads were all wizards at HTML but couldn't align a struct on a power of two boundary. :-)
  • I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but it's possible you might not know. Pointer Arithmetic is a holdover from the Pure-C days, and dosn't really do much other then make your programs a lot more buggy :P. basicaly what it does is let you change the value of a pointer. take this example

    char* strcpy(char* d, char* s){
    while(*s)
    *d++ = *s++
    }

    It's not really that surprizing that someone would a prospective employee to know it, but I don't see why, it might have been all cool about 5-10 years ago, back when people still used typedefs in their code. It dosn't let you do anything you couldn't do with array indecies, really.

    Old style, new style, what's better? who knows. I'm really, really rambling here, geez. um, anyway I hope this explains what pointer math is...

  • Talk To Employees (Score:4)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Saturday October 28, 2000 @05:47AM (#669157) Homepage
    (This goes for all job interviews, by the way)

    Unfortunately, when HR types interview people, they often do it alone or with other HR types. If you're ever interviewing for a job and this happens, this should throw up a red flag. You should be in an interview with other people who will be working with you. You obviously can't expect the truth from anyone in an interview ("So, what do you think of this company?" "It sucks, all I do is sit around on my ass and watch the marketers decide which sporting event to spend their money on next"), but you can tell a lot from enthusiasm, involvement, and whether the questions being asked are "I want to hire you" or "I don't want to hire you" type questions.

    I prefer the latter type questions. If company employees come into the meeting with a "I don't want to hire you," kind of attitude, that means they want you to prove their worth to the company. That means they're looking for qualified people, not another warm body.

    But I'm sure most of you know this already.
  • Working for a pretty respectable web firm, I've gotten to see what it can be like at dot-com ground zero. To be perfectly honest at times it can be kinda scary seeing as the industry's taking a weird turn lately. Eight months or so ago, we were almost beating people away with a stick there was so many potential clients. Money was pouring in, hiring was up, things looked pretty damn good. Fast forward to now ... ugh, it's not as good as it used to be.

    Been hearing alot of things lately like "retaining clients" - "long term relationships" - "site enhancement strategies" - etc. etc. Whereas before it was about "new business", "new clients" ...

    And now with companies like Razorfish laying off hordes of employees ... who knows when it'll trickle down to mid-size companies. I'm thinking this industry is definately in the midst of a stabilization period.
  • Its amazing that people think the rise and fall of so many companies in the .com realm is a singular event.

    Go back and look at how many automobile manufacturers there were in the US in the 1920s and 1930s - over four hundred. How many are there now?

    And guess how many people were pronouncing the death of the automobile industry when those companies were dying off a dozen at a time??

    Turnover is going to be common for the website business, since the barriers to entry are still lower than most traditional businesses.

    This is just the beginning of what will become a huge industry. I'm still long on tech.

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