Down and out (of a job) in Silicon Valley

The dot-com poker buddies of San Francisco resident Ken Belanger knew a losing hand when they saw one.

Most of the original 10 members no longer turn up for a monthly poker night. That form of gambling has been overshadowed by Silicon Valley's higher-stakes losses of money, jobs and above all its fabled swagger.

"I know a bunch of people who are disgusted," Mr Belanger said. "It's really sad. People don't believe anymore."

Silicon Valley, which vaulted to astronomical prosperity in the Internet boom, is still measuring the cost of an unrelenting two-year downturn. For many, the toll is measured in departed friends, the grudging acceptance of low-wage part-time jobs, or the loss of little luxuries like hair salon appointments and season tickets.

California's latest revised employment figures showed Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County alone lost 191,500 jobs - or nearly one in five positions - between the employment market peak of December 2000 and January 2003.

The state also is bracing for weak February numbers after the US Labour Department announced that US job losses last month posted their steepest one-month slide since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Marc Andreessen, who rode high as a former poster boy for the 20-year-old Internet millionaires minted during the boom, said Silicon Valley's current mood reminds him of the malaise that reigned when he arrived in 1994.

"The valley goes through this cycle of very high self-regard, followed by this long period of self-loathing," said Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape and helped spark the Internet boom.

Boom-and-bust cycles are certainly nothing new to the greater San Francisco Bay area. But the damage wrought by the dot-com implosion has been broadly felt since so many area companies fed from the New Economy trough.

"This one is the worst... This time it's everybody," said Jeff Hellman, an out-of-work software tester who is hoping to make a living by playing the guitar outside Silicon Valley-area coffee shops and selling his own recordings.

San Francisco's best-known downturn came after the Gold Rush of 1849, when banking and mining interests pulled up stakes. Lesser-know upheavals hit Silicon Valley in the 1970s, when microchips supplanted defence; in the 1980s, when the personal computer came to the fore; and in the 1990s, when the industry's focus shifted to software and the Web.

The latest bust has claimed several New Economy icons. Scores of smaller companies have quietly failed, and others, like electronic testing and equipment maker Agilent Technologies and video game publisher Sega Corp. have recently cut more area workers.

Santa Clara County includes such tech-heavy cities as San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. It absorbed about half of the state's post-boom job losses and had a January unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent - above California's 6.5 per cent and the national average of 5.7 per cent.

One place where the jobless congregate is Craigslist.org, which rose to local popularity with its boom-time help-wanted and apartment listings. These days the website hosts community forums where displaced members of the New Economy work force compare hints on how to eat on $3 a day, discuss whether to take a job with a big cut in salary, and, on rare occasions, raise a red flag about their own suicidal feelings.

Bill Bucy, whose Palo Alto public relations and marketing firm saw the last of its high-tech clients go away in August, said there is little consolation in the knowledge that he is not the only person looking for work.

"I don't care if everybody's in the same boat as me, I don't want to be in that boat," said Bucy, who is staying busy to fend off the depression, anger and isolation that can come with unemployment.

"It affects everything in your life. Not just what you're eating or driving or whether you're living in a house or apartment," Mr Bucy said. "It gets brutal after a while."

Until full-time work comes around, he is scouring legal documents for a Los Angeles-based private investigator, serving legal subpoenas, and acting in human resources training films.

"I grab the one-off jobs so I'm actually doing something... I'm out among people. At the end of the day, because I've made a few dollars and accomplished something people want done, I feel useful," Mr Bucy said.

Unable to find full-time work, Mr Hellman gave up the rented house he shared with his 13-year-old daughter, returned the girl to her mother's care and took a room for $500 a month.

"If there was one thing that I would have tried to keep it all going for, it would have been to have her stay with me. But that wasn't in the cards," said 52-year-old Mr Hellman.

Despite all the bad news, residents are quick to admit that the boom created a tremendous amount of personal wealth. Many also believe the area's base of skilled workers, venture capitalists and strong universities position it to be the launching pad for the "next big thing."

But Pierce Ledbetter decided not to wait. He went home to Memphis after his three-year stint in Silicon Valley and has since started a software security firm.

"San Francisco's biggest export used to be technology; today it's people," he said.