Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun, the part in which former employees of Internet start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. While they were gone, they tasted what it was like to introduce products without multilayered approvals, to set their own hours, to party hard as well as work hard, and often, to own a sizable stake in the company. And they have seen what the Internet can and cannot do.



But few are the millionaires they expected to be: many are poorer than they were to begin with. Some are still frantically seeking jobs, while others are humbly grateful for finding even ill-suited ones. And many are struggling to gain — or to regain — corporate America’s respect. Even the lucky few who landed exactly where they wanted, are having trouble persuading colleagues that their dot-com experience wasn’t for naught.

The influx is still new, so few if any academics have formally studied it. But management experts, extrapolating from growing anecdotal evidence, say the adjustment is hard for young and middle-aged executives alike, though in different ways.



“The 20-somethings who were brought up in the dot-coms have to learn everything, from dress norms to timeliness to dealing with lines of authority,” said Eric Abrahamson, a management professor at the Columbia Business School.



Far worse, said Daniel Cable, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Keenan Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, they must view their former habits as unacceptable. “The true reality shock,” he said, “comes from trying to unlearn ways of doing things that you’ve been socialized into believing were the norm.”



The older returnees, in contrast, have to persuade colleagues and bosses that they were enhanced, not tainted, by their time away.



“I thought companies would value the experiences that executives had in the dot-com world, like learning to live with thin capitalization and limited resources,” said James M. Citrin, a partner at Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm. “Instead, many shunned the would-be returnees or treated them as though the entire dot-com experience was inconsequential.”



IN fact, many management experts concede that there is no way to know the possible significance of a dot-com foray. Some returning dot-commers come back more willing to take risks; others are totally risk-averse. Some have little patience for processes, while others have newfound respect for structure. Some return supremely confident, while others are grappling with insecurity. Some have learned to operate leanly, but others never learned the value of a dollar.



“I won’t hire those dot-commers who were paying absurd rents, eating in expensive restaurants, basically living on borrowed money and borrowed time,” said Willy Shih, president of the digital and applied imaging division at Eastman Kodak. The company did buy Ofoto, an online photo service, in 2001, but only after Mr. Shih assured himself that Ofoto’s founders “had always had their feet on the ground and would fit in.”



So, if it is not always easy to know how the dot-com experience affected a job candidate, why hire dot-com refugees at all — particularly in a persistently sluggish economy in which qualified applicants without ingrained bad habits far outnumber job openings?
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