Slashdot Mirror
Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback?
jeebus writes "This week a Deloitte study has shown that high on the agenda of CEOs around the world is the shortage of tech talent. Is a shortage of talented geeks in the market seeing a return of the dot-com culture with foosball tables, beanbags, and inflated salaries used to entice talented workers? Welcome to Web 2.0 work culture, the future of yesterday. 'Global recruitment companies were telling prospecting employees that they were no longer going to be employed just because they were a technical guru. They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom. Fast forward to Web 2.0 and while workplaces aren't as cheesy with their decor as they were were in the late '90s, and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys, geeks just aren't chuffed with corporate culture.'"
I really haven't seen any hard evidence that all that many 'web jockeys' were getting some $100k salary, unless they lived in the valley, where cost of living is so bad that 100k is practically minimum wage unless you take the bus 2 hours to work. Does anyone have any stats to back up what the average dot-com era 'web jockey' salary was compared with today?
stuff |
You see this kind of thing happen whenever demand for IT professionals goes up because of the common perception that IT people are 'geeks/nerds' who are willing to take compensation in the form of casual wear and beanbag chairs instead of in salary... Given that the company is interested in its own bottom line, which is cheaper, a pinball machine or giving everyone a raise?
I worked at a DOT BURSTER in 2000, in big wide open space in the burbs, and they had free pizza every Fridays, everyone could wear jeans, I could roll in more or less whenever I wanted, and we all had potentially millions of dollars in soon to be worthless stock options. When hired they asked me if I wanted Linux, or Windows, or both. All of our servers were named after Transformers.
Now, I have a little cubicle, a company issued notebook running Windows XP, and no stock options. All of our servers are named based on an established IBM numbering system. I get to work from home a bit more but that's only because I commute 4 hours a day.
Sure, this gig pays more, but the work environment is not nearly the same. There's no heady optimism about the future, and that, really, when you think about it, the collapse of the dot net boom and worse, the later ruling about expensing stock options, and then the war, this decade has been utterly depressing.
This is my sig.
The reason there is a shortage is that those who were burned the first time wont go back and those that haven't been burned yet have been forewarned by those that have. Very few outside the upper echelons of the .com companies of the 90's saw any real benefit from the .com era the vast majority got hosed. Empty promises, foosball and free juice worked the first time but I can't see many falling for it again. Everyone I worked with in my two experiences with the .com era have moved out of the corporate world and are either with small companies or working as consultants, a few have left the field entirely.
I recently received a call from the Recruiter that hired me on to my last corporate job. I was told the company I was laid off from was looking to hire me back. I told me the whole dog and pony show was starting back up, that the culture had changed and this time would be different and this time it wouldn't be a complete waste of five years of my life. I thought about it for five seconds and told her that I would just as soon bathe in hot lava than go back. She sounded a little upset, and proceeded to tell me that so far she was 0-12 in trying to lure back the folks I worked with. Guess I wasn't alone.