It took foresight to see that the dot-com bubble was about to burst, and some IT workers made career moves to more stable jobs before it happened. Take Norm Villacorte, 31, who until last Thanksgiving was manager of quality assurance at a dot-com e-commerce consulting firm and software supplier in the Chicago area. He saw the company grow from 50 employees to more than 2,000 employees in two short years. He also saw how IBM, EDS and others were drawing business away by last summer. "IBM Global Services, EDS and the Big Five accounting firms put a big hurt on e-commerce solutions like ours," Villacorte says.

Villacorte, who declined to reveal the name of his former employer, says the downturn was clearly evident in the second half of 2000. The company had grown fast and was failing in many ways. The L.A. office operated differently from the way the New York office worked. Execs were often at cross-purposes. E-mail replaced face-to-face contact. And when the layoffs started, it was clearly time to re-evaluate: "Billability," which was tracked on a daily and then hourly basis, became all that mattered there by the fall of 2000, he recalls.

Villacorte's quality-assurance group was cut in half at a time when the company was struggling to provide bug-free code to customers. At the same time, Villacorte's personal life was changing, too: He and his wife were expecting their first baby. After the long Thanksgiving weekend with his family, he decided to look for another job. "I wanted to work closer to home, in an industry with a future," he says. "I guess I was settling down."

He wanted to find a traditional organization with new technology initiatives or an emerging e-commerce division. Villacorte also wanted an office closer to home to reduce his two-hour commute by train each way.

At the time, United Airlines was creating an e-commerce division and was recruiting for the new venture. Villacorte's wife worked for United, but Villacorte says initially he wasn't too sure about making the move because the venture was basically a start-up company.

Eventually, he decided to go for it, because the United Networks venture had United's backing, so if things didn't work out, the new division would likely be merged back in. He joined the company in December as manager of quality assurance.

United Networks upgrades and maintains the United.com Web sites, which include the U.S. site and 26 international sites through one portal. Villacorte is using new tools to develop applications for United.com, such as e-coupons for discount travel and wireless applications designed to notify travelers of flight cancellations, delays and gate information. "Adding wireless capabilities is a whole new education for me," says Villacorte, who is testing wireless applications that will be used by United customers in the future.

Villacorte says his biggest lesson has been that job security is worth more than living on the bleeding edge.