Sarah Browne, a market research consultant, has seen her clients shift away from the "ebrats," as she fondly calls them: those dot-commers who had so much cash that on trips they'd rent a separate hotel room just for their mountain bikes. "But these days, I'm saying, 'Viva la old economy!" An independent for 27 years, she's shifted her client list from 80 percent tech to about 50 percent, and she's back to working for food, women's products and liquor companies.

"It was like a giant feast for a while there, and everybody was gorging at the smorgasbord, and now we're all on a big diet. For every job I did in the last three years, I turned four away." Now, she's glad she held on to that handful of old economy clients.

Some veterans of the technology start-up world maintain that things really haven't gotten as bad as popularly envisioned -- as long as your skills aren't purely dot-com. "I have as much work as I had a year ago, and I haven't lowered my rates," says Diana Benedikt, who consults to early-stage technology companies on raising venture capital and crafting their business plans.

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Her secret: She's shifted her business skills to new markets like wireless and optical networking. "I just took my first optical networking client. I didn't know anything about optical networking, but I applied the skills that I have to their emerging market, and found that I can definitely add value there."

"I think that had I not diversified a year ago, I'd be in serious trouble now," says Brenda Kienan, a content strategist in Oakland, Calif., whose husband was laid off last October as the director of technology at an Internet company. She shifted some of her working to training and teaching when she saw the market start to tighten last year.

Like many consultants, Kienan is discovering that the downturn means she has to actually go back to marketing her skills, instead of choosing which clients to accept. "I'm working as hard as I was last year -- the same number of hours -- but a significant portion of those hours are not billable hours, they're marketing hours."

Fewer billable hours means less money, so we can all look forward to austerity chic. Pink says: "The individual free agents are in a sense microcosms of big companies. They're looking for ways to trim expenses. They're not auctioning their Aeron chairs on eBay and selling plasma downtown, but they are taking some very prudent cost-cutting measures.

"We're not planning any vacations," says Kienan. "We were thinking about getting a new car this year. That's not going to happen. We were thinking about getting a dog this year. That's not going to happen."

But woe to those who did not diversify: The consultants who are worst off are those whose skills are very Web- or e-commerce-centric.

Sandra -- a Silicon Valley Web designer who asked that her name not we used -- expects that her income this year will be about $45,000, half of the $90,000 that she made last year. "For the last couple of years I've been booked out three months in advance. This time last year, I was working 80 hours a week." The clients that are hanging in are the retail clients. But she's the first to admit that the $90,000-a-year heyday was something of an aberration: "I would be working for companies with business models that were really bizarre."

Still, not one of the contractors interviewed for this article expressed any regret at having made the leap to working for themselves. And even with the dip, most of them aren't ready to run scared back to full-time work, assuming there is full-time work to be had.

Jill -- not her real name -- is a Silicon Valley marketing and communications consultant who has worked for companies such as Netscape, Sun and Nortel Networks. She has seen her contract work dry up, and her two best contacts at her favorite recruiting agency were laid off. If things don't improve by the end of the year, she'd take a full-time job: "But only as a last resort."

Nancy Friedman, a freelance copywriter, interviewed for a full-time job at a big branding agency in San Francisco about six months ago, when things started to get chilly. But she didn't take the job, and has since wondered if she'd be better off: "I've had some pangs of regret, but I wonder if I'd taken it, would I have been laid off by now? It's not more secure to be an employee. In two of the best jobs I've had, I've been laid off because of mergers."

And Todd Gemmell, a Java and C++ coder, says he and the other programmers at Coyote Grits who defected from Pixar to work as hired guns don't relish the thought of having to commit to the old full-time grind.

"We shut down the office for a week a year for Burning Man. When it's warmer, we'll arbitrarily take the day off and go on a rafting trip or something. We're fighting really hard for that lifestyle," says Gemmell.

The flip side of the contractor's lament -- first fired! -- is that they're often the first hired back on. After all, after sweeping layoffs, someone has to come and do the work.

"When permanent employees get laid off, sooner or later companies realize that they still have deliverables, they still have deadlines. And who is going to do the work? So ultimately they start hiring contractors back," says Lisa Ferdinandsen, 38, a San Jose graphic designer and project manager. Her two biggest clients -- a chip manufacturer and a medical imaging company -- pulled the plug on her contracts on the same day last week. But even with 50 percent less work, she's still keeping her cool: "I don't feel desperate yet. I was a responsible girl, and I have three months' salary in the bank."

And Kris Bondi, a San Francisco communications consultant, is among the few optimistic consultants in Silicon Valley who says that things are already starting to come back. "I am much more positive now than I would have been a month ago," says Bondi, who watched a few of her tech clients file for bankruptcy or go out of business in December and January. "A lot of businesses were putting things on hold for the first three months of the year. They don't like where we are right now, but they've accepted it, and they've started to move on."

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