By May 2000 when he was contracting for Spark Online for $89 an hour, a recruiter for yet another dot-com came courting. To work full time, Michael (who declined to have his real name used) demanded $80,000 a year and stock options worth one-fifth of 1 percent equity in the company. But to persuade him to leave his contracting gig a few weeks early to take the new job, the corporate suitor offered a salary of $110,000 and the options.

Ten months later, it's a different story.

Michael got laid off at the end of February, and gone with his last job are the pack of hungry start-ups, armed with too much venture capital, panting after his services. In his first two weeks of job hunting, he didn't have a single interview. After our conversation, he came by the Salon offices to print out his résumé, so he could avoid a trip to Kinko's.

Remember all that handwringing in the technology industry about the shortage of programmers posing a grievous threat to the national economy? And the attendant hue and cry for more H-1B visas to import the top talent we couldn't generate at home? Not to mention the promises that in the so-called new economy the rules had changed forever, especially for the technical elite, with a long boom bringing us an ever-rising stock market and a job market where candidates called the shots?

Tell that to Michael, a coder skilled in Java, C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic, JavaScript, Perl, XML and CGI: "Salaries are lower compared to what they were just a year or two ago," he says, "$75,000 to $90,000 for a serious engineer. And contracts are in the $60-to-$75 range. There are people who are looking for tons of skills, and they want to pay $60 an hour, when a year ago they were paying $100."

Programmers, so recently courted like college athletes, have become job hunters. "Companies are not as good at getting back to you as they used to be," Michael says. "A year ago, they were trying to get in touch with you, and now you have to try to get in touch with them." And the news keeps getting worse. Earlier last week, Intel announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs via attrition, and on Friday, Cisco, long the darling of Wall Street, revealed that it may lay off as many as 8,000 employees.

But Michael's still holding out hope of finding full-time work at his old high $110,000 salary. He's giving himself two months to do it, and he'll assume that any stock options are as good as worthless. "Luckily, I started saving last year. I suppose I could cash in the 401K, but that wouldn't be fun." Too bad he started investing in tech stocks two years ago. His savings have lost 25 percent of their value.

No one really feels sorry for the code jockeys who ruled the headlines in recent years with their options and their five-figure signing bonuses, their cushy perks -- a new car! an Aeron chair! a complete workstation at home! an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii! But even a few months ago, when dubious dot-coms were laying off fluffy content and marketing people left and right, few imagined that the geeks who write the actual code and make the servers run would feel the pinch. Someone has to make the products and keep the sites up, right? But as the dot-com downturn has deepened and a more general economic slowdown has taken hold, it turns out not even geeks are immune.

The Free Software Project
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