Transatlantic Cable: Let the great job hunt begin (again)!

In June of last year, I wrote a column about getting a job in the Silicon Valley. At the time, the job market was red hot, with companies regularly offering huge signing bonuses to get people to join them. In fact, one company went as far as offering to pay for a three-year lease on a BMW Z3 Roadster to anybody willing to fill their software engineering positions.

It seemed that anybody who knew anything about computers could pretty much walk into a job and get a big fat bonus for getting out of bed and bothering to turn up.

In my June 1999 column, I mentioned one company that had even taken to posting job adverts for a vice president of engineering on lampposts in South Park, the heart of the dot-com neighbourhood of South of Market.

But things ain't what they used to be. In the past 15 months, we've had many of the dot-com companies launched in a blaze of publicity run out of cash and fall apart. Even seemingly well funded companies such as pop.com, Toysmart.com and living.com have gone bust or simply decided that they can't go on. So what does all this mean for people looking for a job?

"Things have improved significantly over the past three to six months for employers," says Scott Mitic, COO and founder of Headlight.com, an online training company which was behind the mystery job ads on South Park lampposts last year.

"The difference is there is less demand. More and more companies are going bust and others are slowing hiring. The feeding frenzy has disappeared and it's more of a buyers' market, where we can be more picky about who we hire. The days of posting job adverts on lampposts are over."

Is the gold rush over?

However, it is important to note that it's hardly all doom and gloom over here. Unemployment is still at a record low, and it's still incredibly unusual to meet an unemployed programmer or website designer (unless their company has gone public and they have retired early).

In fact, a recent survey by trade magazine The Industry Standard revealed that the average salary for a "net worker" (pretty much anybody who works in a dot-com company) was $84,700 (approx. £60,000). When you add in bonuses and commissions, this jumps to a hefty $104,000 (approx. £73,000) - hardly chump change in any country.

Mind you, they do work for the money - the same survey claims that they, on average, work 10.1 hours a day, although the eight per cent who are allowed to take their dogs to work at least have some company...

Feck, we've gone bust

And speaking of recruitment, the hot site of the moment fits the mood of the Valley. http://www.f**kedcompany.com (*readers of a sensitive nature should not fill in the blanks*) - as the name suggests - is about companies that have gone or are going bust, and users of the site are gaining big bragging rights by winning the competition the site runs.

The idea is simple: you register with the site and select five companies that you think are on the way out. You are then given points when they hit problems, with the number of points you get depending on the severity of the ills the company is in: you get a few points if they are laying people off and loads of points if they go completely bust and shut down.

The person behind the site isn't bothered about a little controversy and he has so far resisted the efforts of several companies to get their names and problems removed from the site. There have even apparently been cases of people posting information about their own companies, and it has even become a hot site for venture capital companies to use to check how their investments are doing.

However, in an ironic twist, the creator of the site could now do very well out if it himself: he recently decided to give up and sell the site on eBay, where it has currently attracted seemingly serious offers in excess of $10 million...