Back in the day when IPOs for the likes of TheGlobe.com were sending stock prices to obscene heights, it was clear to plenty of cynical observers that hype had replaced substance in the Internet economy. But few people could have imagined just how ugly and stupid the end of all the fun and games would be.

Here at Salon, where we are both part of the dot-com mix and obliged to report on it, we have been reviewing an endless stream of story pitches from newly laid off dot-com employees lamenting their harsh new "emperor has no stock options" reality. Judged individually, these stories, most of which are drenched in a cloying cloud of ironic self-pity, don't tell us much more than how it feels to be a liberal arts major who got a groovy job just out of college and then lost it all of a sudden and gosh doesn't that really suck. But judged collectively, these "last days of my dot-com" stories start to add up -- as yet another datum of evidence proving that the entire dot-com explosion was just one massively botched-up amateur hour.

Never mind start-up entrepreneurs' well-known inability to control costs or produce products that people actually wanted -- these jokers couldn't even be trusted to get rid of their employees in a halfway civilized manner. We'll concede that laying off people is never easy; there is no painless or perfect way to get it done. But a survey of our recently unemployed friends and colleagues reveals a stunning variety of ham-handed exercises in corporate doofusness. In the spirit of sharing, we offer you a few choice nuggets.

Freezing at Snowball.com

"Here's how the layoffs began," recalled one former employee of Snowball.com. "The human resources director sends a list of the people that are to be canned within the next few weeks to the CEO. All e-mails to the CEO first go through his personal assistant. The personal assistant's name happens to be on the list of layoffs (a small, yet crucial fact that the HR director happened to overlook). The assistant starts e-mailing the other people on the list, letting them know of their impending doom.

"The next morning, HR is forced to move quickly and do all the layoffs before they had planned to. My phone rings and I have a feeling I know what's coming. 'Due to market conditions, we're unfortunately having to lay some of our employees off. Please try to keep this to yourselves, as we're trying to control the flow of information.' Do they not realize how close we all sit to each other? Come on, everyone could probably hear her on the phone, laying me off. She's only a few cubicles away.

"I hang up my phone. My co-worker's phone, which sits merely inches from mine, begins to ring. She ignores it, knowing what's coming. One by one, all the phones in my area ring, letting us know (at least those of us who actually picked up the phone) that our project has been terminated, thereby rendering us expendable.

"Ah, the Internet. At least I have some good stories to tell."

All the news that's fit to print -- oops!

"We had the unique and possibly unprecedented experience of reading about our layoffs in the very publication that was laying us off, before management bothered to inform anybody," reports a staffer at the New York Times on the Web. "Sure, all the classic signs were there. Rumors, hearsay, admonitions delivered over e-mail: 'Supply orders are on hold till further notice or until our resources are exhausted,' read one particularly evocative message.

"Management quickly spun into damage control mode and called a meeting early the next week. Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital, reassured the newly anxious remaining employees that nobody had done anything wrong. The downsizing was purely a result of 'deteriorating market conditions.'

"He stood in the middle of our just-finished new office space. An enormous two-floored, Starbucks-inspired, 1997-era dot-com Arcadia, the space -- and the untold millions it took to create it -- was apparently not a mistake. (It's now maybe half full.) Also apparently not a mistake was the multimillion-dollar purchase of Abuzz, a 'knowledge-sharing' software company that has been an unmitigated failure on every level.

"Funny how layoffs work. The axed employees apparently amount to $6 million in saved payroll. Probably just enough to squander on yet another ill-fated 'visionary' Internet venture."

The Free Software Project
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