When Rebecca Bregman was laid off from an Internet company in March for the second time in a little over a year, she decided to put the turmoil of the technology industry behind her.
"Twice is enough," she said. "I didn't want to be one of those people who got laid off five times."
As the casualty list of defunct dotcoms grows, so does the number of workers who have collected multiple pink slips and who are concluding that it was not this job or this company that did not quite work out, it was this industry. And for them, the question of what to do next looms large.
Although much has been written about dotcom carpetbaggers returning to the banks and law firms they left to join the Internet gold rush, for many disillusioned dotcom workers, the future involves more complicated choices. Those who joined Internet companies just out of college rarely have other careers to fall back on. Others simply find themselves at a loss, exhausted by long hours and the disappointment of being part of a boom that went bust.
For Bregman, who was laid off from the online entertainment company Pseudo.com in February last year, only to be given another pink slip about a year later from Conde Nast's online counterpart, the short-term solution was to return to a prior career as a production coordinator for films. "Even in the Depression, people went to the movies," she reasoned. "So that's what I decided, I had to get back into film."
Since March, Bregman has been the coordinator on a Nickelodeon special and the assistant coordinator for a feature film. She says she does not especially enjoy the long days on the set or the anxiety over finding another project every few months. "But it's better than working at a dotcom," she said. "I just don't know what dotcom I'd even want to work for -- there's not a lot of sites that interest me anymore."
The disappearance of many of the industry's more entertaining sites, not to mention the culture of fun that brought beanbags and foosball tables into offices, is one of the reasons some Internet workers have decided to move on.
"It's an entirely different culture, entirely different expectations," said Ben Clemens, who left his job in August as director of information architecture at Rare Medium, an Internet consulting firm in New York, when the company shifted away from Web-site design toward more technical systems-integration projects. "The kind of people who do that work are not bad," he said. "They're just different."
Clemens spent several months working for an Internet company in London before returning to New York this spring. Now, he faces the challenge of mapping out a new career without a clear focus.
"I'm what is rapidly becoming a cliche," he said, "the person who was doing this stuff who is not doing it anymore who really doesn't know what to do with their life."
For some, that quandary comes up even before their job actually ends, as the company's bank account heads toward zero and additional financing is uncertain.
"It sort of reminds me of the last few months of college when you realize, `This is all ending, and I'm going to have to get a real job,"' said Garret Glaser, vice president for marketing at a startup that makes software to run online marketplaces. He said the company has been looking for "another round of funding in an increasingly unforgiving market," which had created an atmosphere of uncertainty for employees.
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