RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- Damon Clark began his high-tech career at Nortel Networks fresh out of college, just two weeks before the company's first wave of layoffs in 2001.
The electrical engineer jumped to another job last summer before the bankrupt corporation got around to downsizing him.
At 31, he says his 28 percent salary cut at Aviat Networks in Morrisville was a small price to pay, considering that he has friends here who've been unemployed for months and are looking for jobs all over the country.
Clark is typical of the Triangle's telecom industry brain trust. Thousands of local workers navigate layoffs and other shake-ups that thin out weak companies, give rise to new employers in the region, and restock opportunistic competitors with a highly trained work force. Their anxiety only intensifies during periodic economic disruptions.
"I came to RTP because of all the telecommunications firms," Clark said. "I liked the idea that I could go across the street. I liked that it was a central hub for an industry."
The last such episode of creative destruction shook up the region during the dot-com bust a decade ago, when Nortel hired Clark and began weeding out highly paid workers. At the time, Nortel was home to as many as 10,000 local employees and contractors, making it the crown jewel of the region's telecom hub.
Soon Nortel will be a historical footnote, leaving just one supersize telecom employer in the area: Cisco Systems, with 4,300 employees and contractors.
Even as new tech companies are moving in to replace others that have peaked and waned, the disruption inevitably raises questions about the long-term prospects for the Triangle's place in the global telecom sector. New job announcements are restoring a fraction of the jobs lost during the recession, and some tech workers have been jobless for more than a year.
The nation's technology hubs - Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle and others - have been battered by the recession. Economic developers and academics say the Triangle's tech culture can no longer sustain itself by recruiting megabrands such as Cisco, Nortel and IBM.
"It's a real question whether we'll make that transition," said Ted Zoller, a business professor , who heads UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for Entrepreneurship. "RTP was built on the concept of attracting the giants. But our future will be based on attracting smaller, more nimble, market-driven companies."
High-tech jobs erased
The current remapping of the telecommunications landscape has erased thousands of high-tech workers from the region's economy. Nortel, which designs and manages telecom networks, is auctioning itself out of existence, while mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson is shutting down an RTP operation that once employed 850people.
Smaller outposts like avecom, Pliant and Ciena missed their growth opportunities here and left, while many of those that remain have trimmed staff.
Alcatel-Lucent is down to about 340 workers in the Triangle from a high of about 1,800 a decade ago when the company was Alcatel. Ericsson, which once employed 1,900 people in the area, is down to about 120 - all former Nortel employees who came over recently with Ericsson's acquisition of a Nortel unit that provides services and support for wireless phone networks.
"In the technology industry, like their products, the companies have a relatively short life span," said Michael Smith, a research analyst in Greensboro with the Gartner firm. "When you have an economic tsunami, you see an awful lot of acquisitions or companies going out of business. That's when companies with a good cash position go out on a shopping spree."
Rick Bartz has been through this corporate mill three times now. An engineer, he was first laid off by Nortel, then rehired by the company to work as a contractor for Selectron Technologies until that project ended.
He has spent the past six years at Sony Ericsson; his position will end April 30 when the struggling company winds down its local operations. At 58, he's again looking for his next high-tech job, a predicament increasingly common among the displaced high-tech elites.
"It's tough. These are all degreed people," he said. "The ultimate thing today is: Never get used to staying in a company for five or 10 years."
A glut of skilled workers
One consequences of this oversupply of labor is a lower market value for these highly skilled technology workers. Employers are snapping up top talent at a bargain.
Bartz, who lives in Cary, said he would be willing to take a pay cut of as much as $30,000 for the right job.
"It's better than sitting on unemployment," he said. "You almost have to take what they [employers] want."
Still, Voller and Smith say the Triangle is a vibrant industry hub that will regenerate itself as the economy recovers. It retains sufficient gravitational force to attract employers and keep innovative workers here.
Competitors are already moving in to fill the void created by the decline of Nortel, Sony Ericsson and others. Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry phone, is opening a research facility, as is Garmin, the world's largest maker of satellite navigation devices.
Tech stalwarts Ciena, Avaya and Genband are all setting up operations in the Triangle as they buy business units from Nortel. In December, Avaya hired 230 Nortel workers in RTP when it bought the Nortel unit that provided voice and data services for businesses and government agencies.
The corporate churn is epitomized by Ciena, which closed an RTP office in 2005 and is now making a re-entry into the region with the acquisition of a Nortel business unit.
A few telecommunications network designers, like Tekelec, which employs 675 in Morrisville, have weathered the recession virtually unscathed. Tekelec makes technology that initiates and terminates phone calls, and allows people to keep the same phone numbers when they switch services.
Some companies are remaking themselves to remain competitive. Aviat, which employs 250 at its Morrisville headquarters, was known as Harris Stratex Networks until last month. The company develops wireless relays in communications networks.
Where they landed
Damon Clark now manages Aviat's network operations center, which handles communications networks for mass transit agencies, municipal governments, wireless providers and other clients. In the middle of a severe recession, with Nortel in bankruptcy protection and laying off hundreds of workers, Clark applied for one locally posted job that appealed to him, and jumped at the offer.
"In the past, there would be lots of jobs I'd be interested in," he said.
Pat Davis, 53, a manager of maintenance services at Aviat, also took a pay cut when he jumped ship last fall from Nortel, where he had worked a quarter-century. His wage differential is about 40 percent, in part because he had an unusually successful final year selling services at Nortel, he said.
He beat out three Nortel colleagues for the Aviat job.
"They could have easily brought in somebody else at even a lower salary level,"Davis said.
