I just found out that my former employer, Vanteon, shut down the Redmond office where I used to work up until about 1½ years ago. The place started as MicroCrafts around 1989, and the developers who owned it sold out to a division of a larger company (Metamor WorldWide) that was bought by PSINet but eventually spun off the software consulting business into Vanteon. Of course, PSINet later went bankrupt and most of its consulting business was sold to a group that took back the Metamor name. Vanteon went seriously downhill under corporate ownership. The seeds were sown early on in corporate ownership, but it really began to show in the summer of 2000. In April of 2000, the owners decided to jump on the dot-com bandwagon and make web development for dot-coms a high priority. Now, if you recall, the dot-coms began crashing in March 2000. So a month later was not the right time to jump on the bandwagon. Anyway, we went from 90 devs that June to about 15 the following January mostly through layoffs but through some attrition that no one attempted to stop. Until I left, when they really wined and dined me to stay. I told them I would only stay if they could show me a good sales pipeline. They tried to offer me more money and a more prestigious position. I took a pay cut and dropped from a lead to line developer position to come here.
Anyway, it's all over for Vanteon Redmond now.
Now I just have to find all my former co-workers and recruit them!