By Gabriel Spitzer

     It’s a Thursday morning at Squaw Valley ski resort at Lake Tahoe, near the California-Nevada border.
   It happens to be one of the best powder days of the season, and all the locals have skipped work to hit the slopes.
    John Anderson, a San Francisco resident whose dot.com job evaporated in December, is waiting in line for the ski lift.
    "I overheard the guy behind me say, ‘not bad for another day of unemployment.’ I turned around and said ‘you too?’ 
    "And then the guy in front of me said ‘you guys too?’ For a minute it felt like everyone on the slope had been laid off," says Anderson.
   The company Anderson worked for was a good idea. The business plan was solid, the customers happy. But the money just dried up, and now he is searching for another job in the Bay Area, at the moment one of the toughest job markets in the country.
   In the meantime, Anderson is collecting unemployment.
   "There’s a name for people who collect unemployment checks and go skiing: it’s called the Governor’s Ski Team."
   The San Francisco media community doesn’t have Madison Avenue. It doesn’t have a raft of marquee magazines and book publishers. What it did have, until a few months ago, was a thriving tech community awash in advertising money.
   Now that the unemployment offices are packed with out-of-work dot.commers, the media agencies have been among the first to feel the bite.
   "I think San Francisco was hit the hardest. Three weeks ago, there was a woman referred to me in San Francisco who said she couldn’t even find freelance work. That’s what all the San Francisco recruiters were telling us here. There wasn’t even a freelance media job," says Susan Sedler, a Chicago recruiter who does business with Bay Area media agencies.
   "I think they’ve already hit bottom. I certainly hope they’ve hit bottom. In the last few weeks, there’s been some work popping up."
   But few of the big agencies in San Francisco have positions to fill. Most, in fact, are moving in the opposite direction.
    "I know that pretty much every major agency in town has laid people off," says an executive at a prominent San Francisco media agency. Last month that agency trimmed 10 percent of its workforce.
   "Everyone I talk to is being completely optimistic. They say we’ll be out of this in three months. 
    "I don’t know what they’re basing this on. The thing that’s fairly remarkable is that there isn’t a lot of new business going on right now. If anything is going to pull us out, it’s new business."
  Christina Woo is an executive at a San Francisco-based new media company.
   The contrast between the job market now and in 1999, when she received her MBA at Harvard, is stark.
   "When we graduated, we all had three or four job opportunities. Now it’s a struggle to get just one," she says.
   "In business school, they would always host recruiting dinners and get-togethers. It would be amazing how many people would go, all looking for a job, who would then get incredibly drunk and just use the opportunity to get free food and alcohol. That’s not happening so much in the current economy."
   Some people who were determined to land a new job right away are still finding work; it’s simply a matter of swallowing pride and working hard. But not everybody has been so lucky.
    "I haven’t gotten shit. Not a single reply; even for really good fits. Monster.com has been a total waste of my time. Oracle, CNET, Schwab—they’re all in hiring freezes or laying people off. Company after company," says one frustrated former dot.com employee.
   "People still have job postings, but I don’t believe they’re filling them. People keep postings up even if they don’t have positions."
    Still, this is not 1929, and these are not laid-off steelworkers with families to support.
   Few people are panicking just yet. In fact, laid-off dot.com workers can be surprisingly finicky—perhaps too finicky.
    "With small companies, folks with a few years of experience and an MBA from a top-notch school could be hired in as a director or VP. I've talked with a lot of folks who are now hesitant to go back to being an associate, so they are living on friends' couches, eating from friends' refrigerators, and telling themselves that the jobs that are available are beneath them," says Woo.  
   Many of the people with fancy-sounding titles at internet companies are now reluctant to cast their lots back in with the entry-level people at new companies.
   "Lots of the people who are looking for work were part of this dot.com fiasco, and their expectations are often inflated," says Anderson.
    "Recruiters have told me that employers are getting bombarded with résumés from people who don’t have the skills they think they have, who’ve never built a successful product, their salary expectations are through the roof, and their egos are gigantic. It seems like employers are hesitant to even open an email with a résumé attached."

April 4, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life

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