@LARGE

How laid-off techies use a summer away from the grind

By Scott Kirsner

How are the legions of newly jobless techies spending their involuntary summer vacations?

They're booking flights to Australia and New Zealand, hopping the pond to France, practicing the violin, growing herb gardens, reading the Iliad, spending more time with their kids. They're doing needlepoint, taking classes in lampshade-making, and car-camping around New England.

In short, they're goofing off.

"Given this economy, the summer is dead," says Veronica Leger, the former vice president of marketing at HookMedia, an online marketing firm. Leger was laid off in April with two weeks of severance.

"I have a bunch of friends who did the dot-commie thing and are unemployed now," she says. "There's not a whole lot out there, job-wise. You have no choice but to be calm and wait it out."

"People laid off by some of the bigger local tech companies, like EMC, seem to have gotten decent severance packages," says Michael Robichaud, CEO of the recruiting site TechieGold.com and the recruiting firm Stride & Associates, both in Boston. "There's not much hiring going on in July and August, so the attitude seems to be, `I've got cash in my pocket, why not make the best of it?"'

Leger has repainted some of the walls in her apartment, dedicated more time to the gym, and visited Mount Desert Island in Maine with a friend from business school who was laid off from another local tech company earlier this year. Like many victims of the dot-com diaspora, she is collecting unemployment for the first time, and cutting down radically on discretionary spending.

"I'm a clothes horse, but I don't go into stores now," she says. "Anything I purchase has to be absolutely necessary."

Sean Roche, cut loose from Channelwave, a Cambridge software company, in April, wrote me a "How I'm Spending My Involuntary Summer Vacation" e-mail essay:

"For the first two months, I was in denial and acted as though I hadn't lost my job. When it finally sank in, here's how my life changed: not much. I still went into the office every day, but to look for jobs. It's air-conditioned and our house isn't. I have voicemail at work, but not at home. ... But it's tough to work 8-10 hours a day looking for work..."

So Roche has also worked on improving his golf, built a Shakespeare site on the Web, and, he writes, "sat around reminding people of how I had predicted the demise of the `new economy,' without an answer for why I chose to work in it."

Joel Abrams, laid off in May from Informio, a voice applications start-up, explains that he has been reading "some long-deferred classics, like the Iliad," growing an herb garden, and cooking dinner for his wife.

"I've given myself permission not to worry about employment until the fall," Abrams writes via e-mail. "Luckily, I have enough savings, and an employed wife, to enable me to enjoy this time."

Abrams gets together with another unemployed friend, Pat McCarthy, once a week at a sub shop in Waltham to commiserate and, frankly, to have something to do. McCarthy is much less blithe about his situation than Abrams. He bought a two-bedroom house in Franklin and a new Jeep Wrangler just before losing his job at Remote Reality, a start-up that enables 360-degree imaging on the Web.

"When I got laid off just before Memorial Day, I had a polar opposite feeling," McCarthy says. "One side was, try to enjoy the time off, because I'd never had more than two weeks between jobs since college. I should be going kayaking, fishing, golfing. The other side was the urgency to get back in the work force and earn a legitimate paycheck. Unemployment [checks] are nowhere near enough."

McCarthy has been doing remodeling work for friends in Newport this summer.

"Floors, walls, ceilings. It's hard work," he says. "But it's great to have hard work to do during the day to keep me occupied."

For those who lost their jobs earlier in the year, it's harder to see the summer as a welcome breather. BeFree, an online marketing firm, eliminated Steve Kirstein's position in February. Jobs that Kirstein interviewed for in March and April seemed to evaporate.

"Either the job was withdrawn from consideration," Kirstein says, "or the senior hiring person inexplicably left the company. Then, the floor fell out," and the number of jobs companies were listing dropped sharply in May.

Still, in between practicing the violin, riding his BMW motorcycle, and spending more time with his daughter, Kirstein spends four or five hours a day, four days a week, looking for work.

"I do my diligence. I'm not disappearing [on trips] for weeks at time," he says. "I thought I wouldn't be out of work more than three weeks. This whole thing has been a disappointment. It's a drag."

Last summer, networking events in the Boston tech community were still populated by cocky, employed people casting around for better-paying jobs. This summer, they're populated by humbled, unemployed people casting around for any job at all. When they tell their stories about spending the summer building decks and learning Spanish, I can't help wondering whether their approach is a healthy use of time off for personal enrichment or just a make-shift bar against complete panic. Of course, it is likely a little of both.

Unemployed techies want to view this summer as a short stretch of rejuvenation before the next crusade. Their hope is that, come September, employers will sense that the worst is over -- bottom has been hit -- and start hiring again. But think about how many people were employed in technology in Boston during the Internet boom. To expect that all of them will find new jobs this fall is unrealistic, unless another Internet-style boom comes along next month -- and the odds of that are roughly equivalent to the odds of six inches of snow arriving this afternoon.

In September, predicts Ralph Protsik, a founder of the recruiting firm Boston Search Group, "People who have taken the summer off to go to the beach will get back into the market. Fall energizes people in lots of different ways. No one wants to be out of a job two months down the road, in November or December."

Next month, plenty of techies will be tanned, rested, and ready to return to the grind.

But will the grind be ready for them?

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.