DALLAS Tech industry collapse leaves many demoralized

Church groups and job-finding networks have sprung up in the wake of the crash.
WASHINGTON POST
DALLAS -- If the Dallas telecom and high-tech boom of the '90s was one long, fabulous, damn-the-torpedoes party, Gregg Wetterman was the glad-handing master of ceremonies.
Ceaselessly smiling and goofily amiable, Wetterman was the founder and driving force behind Geekmeet.com, which drew techies together in a whirl of mixers and bashes and cocktail parties where job tips and fat salary offers were tossed around like drink orders.
Now the party's over. The other night, Wetterman sat to one side in a cavernous nightclub nursing a Chivas and a Camel, glumly watching a sparse crowd mingle at his annual Big Geek Santa Event. Two years ago a couple of thousand people hobnobbed at Geek Santa; this year, just a few score showed up to eat cold pizza and half-heartedly trade business cards before heading for the doors.
"During the heyday, presidents of companies -- I mean decent-size companies -- and network support guys all hung out together here," Wetterman said wistfully. "As things have hit the fan, there's a lot less of that. We're still in the shakeout phase here."
Boom and bust
In the 1990s, Dallas developed one of the largest agglomerations of telecommunications firms in the world and laid a reasonable claim to being the Wireless Capital of the Universe. Nearly every big player in telecom manufacturing is here in force, including a number of gigantic foreign firms whose American headquarters -- Nortel, Fujitsu, Ericsson, Samsung, Alcatel -- are in a corridor just north of Dallas in suburban Richardson.
By the reckoning of many economists, the Dallas-Fort Worth area grew into America's second-largest technopolis, trailing only Silicon Valley in terms of output, employment and economic scale. The semiconductor itself was developed near here at the company that became Texas Instruments; technology seemed a part of the region's birthright.
But now the brio and swagger of the boom years are gone, swept away in the technology crash and replaced by a grim landscape of home foreclosures, vacant office buildings, empty parking lots and thousands of anxious, angry white-collar workers facing their second consecutive Christmas with no jobs and little income.
As the tide of telecom cash and arrogance has receded here, it has left a residue of despair and bitterness that has touched churches and marriages, even language. So many people have lost their jobs in telecom and technology fields that the word "unemployed" has been deemed impolitic; it is being gradually replaced by the gentler "in transition."
Low mood
The semantic makeover has done nothing to cushion the impact on individuals or the overall business psyche of the area, which most agree is in the dumps for now despite the remarkably diversified local economy.
"At a minimum, it's been a very humbling experience for the business community in north Texas," said Huntley Paton, publisher of the Dallas Business Journal. "For a while it looked like this region had so much going for it -- our location in the middle of the country, a great business environment, pretty good tax climate, short flight to either coast. It wasn't necessarily that Dallas was recession-proof, but the prevailing thought when things started going south was: Whatever happens nationally won't be as severe here. And if anything, what's happened has been more severe here."
Of 200,000 or so technology jobs in the Dallas area two years ago, at least 30,000 have been lost, according to the Metroplex Technology Business Council. What intensified the impact is that so many of those jobs were in a single sector, telecommunications, and in a relatively compact area: Richardson.
Network of help
The layoffs, which began in earnest about 18 months ago, have given rise not only to an entrenched legion of jobless workers, but also to a cottage industry of job placement companies, networking associations and church groups trying to help them.
"If you want to be unemployed, this is the best place," said Lisa Miller, who runs a large networking and support group for laid-off tech workers called Careerconnection.org.
In some cases, veterans of technology firms have abandoned the field altogether.
Neil Willoughby, a 60-year-old former information technology executive who found himself unable to land any job that fit his credentials, got a real estate license at a community college.
And Dick Nash, who went through four small telecom firms in four years, gave up the industry and recast himself as inventor and marketer-in-chief of the Leak Frog. Small and green, it is meant to detect leaks behind toilets and beneath sinks -- and rescue Nash from an industry that he thinks promised too much and delivered too little.
Not many have Nash's knack for novelty and ebullient self-promotion. For most who have lost good jobs, and remained out of work for a year or more, the problems have mounted, affecting their relationships with friends, spouses, even God.