In Silicon Valley these days, precious few jobs are available for high-tech workers. In the past two years, hundreds of companies have folded and tens of thousands of employees have been laid off. Many of the job hunters who came here in the late 1990s for the dot-com rush are gone. 76
“Dad, I’ll pay you a dollar if you baby-sit me for an hour.” Coming from his five-year-old daughter, this offer got the attention of a middle-aged oil-company executive. “All the money in her piggy bank for an hour of my time,” he says. “I realized I’d let my life get pretty far out of whack.” 69
On Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2001, the magazine where I worked as a marketing manager for more than two years laid off 69 employees. I was one of them. The layoffs weren’t a surprise. We’d heard about them internally and on CNN and in the New York Post. In fact, for at least a week prior,
