Tech workers held the power right before the dot-com bubble burst. They do now, too
Working with local tech companies these days, Andrea Krueger is reminded of the dot-com bubble.
It’s not that companies are feverishly buying up internet domain names again, hoping to strike it rich from internet gold. It’s just that most talented tech workers have jobs already — meaning they hold the power over employers just as they did in the late 1990s.
“... Most good people were working, and it was very hard to find active job seekers,” said Ms. Krueger, director of people and culture initiatives at Pittsburgh Technology Council on the North Side.
During the dot-com bubble, she found it took a lot of relationship building and networking to help land new talent for her clients. It wasn’t as simple as finding folks who respond to job ads.
“It’s not so much the company interviewing the candidate. It’s really the candidate interviewing the company, as well,” Ms. Krueger added. “The company has to have a good value proposition, not just a cool ping-pong table or whatever.”
In 2005, she left her job as business development manager at Pittsburgh Technology Council and began working as national sales director for a multilevel marketing company, Silpada Designs.
Based in Lenexa, Kan., the company sold jewelry through direct selling — similar to systems used by Pampered Chef or Mary Kay makeup. Avon, another cosmetic company, acquired the company for $650 million in 2010.
A few years later, Ms. Krueger left her job.
The culture just wasn’t what it used to be, she said. It became quite corporate. Her recruiter mind was spinning — she wouldn’t have advised another person to stay at such a company.
So, she returned to the tech council in late 2016. That brought its own adjustments.
“I definitely experienced some culture shock,” Ms. Krueger said.
“I had been working for over a decade in a space that was dominated by women, and so re-entering tech, it was immediately palpable, the lack of gender parity, that there were way more men still in this industry than women.”
Now, Ms. Krueger is using her recruiting intuition to help her husband. He had worked as a retail manager at a GNC store but was laid off as sites like Amazon gobbled away at brick-and-mortar sales and jobs.
Knowing it’s a workers market for those in tech, she helped him enroll in the Tech Elevator computer programming boot camp, which operates on the North Side. It costs just under $15,000, but her husband was lucky to receive nearly $5,000 in state grants to help subsidize his education.
This is one way that Pittsburgh can infuse the tech economy with the workers it needs, Ms. Krueger said.
But it’s also vital that companies remove barriers to employment like degree requirements, she said. It’s just not in line with reality.
“Maybe you don’t want to hire the person from a coding boot camp, but there’s nobody else,” she said.
In Pittsburgh, employers are often just “shuffling the deck,” she said. That means a person may work at BNY Mellon and then leave for PNC and again depart for UPMC.
“We have to stop shuffling the deck. We have to infuse more people,” Ms. Krueger said. “Re-skill people.”