Schmoozing down the dot-com highway
Philip Kaplan -- whose site acts as a dot-com death-watch warning mechanism -- was the toast of New York New Media's annual SuperCyberSuds networking event.
Throngs of sobered thirtysomethings jammed the halls of the Hilton Hotel, trying to search and schmooze their way past the potholes in the Internet highway. In fact, there were so many wannabes at Thursday afternoon's hottest panel, "How to get a job in Silicon Alley," that even the overflow room was standing-room only.
While resumes and business cards exchanged hands among the primarily black-on-black-bedecked crowd, attendees expressed guarded optimism that maybe, just maybe, the stalled IPOs and layoffs among New York's dot-com elite, such as Pseudo.com and MTVi.com, epitomized the last of the bad news.
Kaplan, who spoke on the opening panel, "Life & money in the Alley," told the audience that "80 to 90 percent of the (dot-com) ridiculousness" reported on the F*ckedcompany site happens outside of New York.
Nontheless, "people are being a lot more careful about where they put their money," Kaplan said. "There are fewer lavish parties being held."
The president and CEO of HotJobs.com, Richard Johnson, agreed.
"The windows (of opportunity) where you could get the kind of funding we initially did are shut right now," Johnson said.
"We're not going to be seeing people right out of school who told me they wanted to make a couple of million dollars in two years," Johnson continued. "Blind passion has given way to expectations to work hard. Nine-to-five (work hours) are not dot-com."
Those slapped by the current realities of worthless stock options and dot-com layoffs don't seem completely disillusioned. Just don't call them dot-com refugees.
Net-based business job changers might be preferable. Or, as one dot-com PR executive, admittedly panicked by the recent rash of layoffs, told a colleague: "I'm just phasing into a new stage of my career."
"It's still a candidate's market, but there's definitely been a tightening up," acknowledged a recruiter for Cutting Edge Personnel Inc., a search firm specializing in "the new media and the Internet economy."
Sitting at a nearby table at the SuperCyberSuds job fair, another recruiter working for a freelance staffing firm Paladin said that, while many Silicon Alley professionals used to switch jobs at least once a year, "things were slowing down after the (dot-com) market crash."
The busiest booths at the job fair were those of the household-named Internet companies, such as IBM Corp., Juno Online Services and Barnes & Noble.com -- not those of the Web integrators like Razorfish or "relationship architects for e-business" like Web marketing/design consultancy Novo.
Despite it all, there's still a sense of Silicon Alley magic in the air.
"We think we've hit the basement," said HotJobs' Johnson. "Dot-coms are now hiring people with traditional skills, not necessarily people with dot-com experience. The real companies will do well and will be great places to work."