Im tired of sentiment like this. I havent been here long but ive had the same feelings about multiple communities as they mature. Its part of them growing up and has a lot to do with the members growing up.
In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.
If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?
As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.
I was a) too young and b) too sheltered from it we were only just getting consumer dial up in homes about that time in our country. But as i understand it yes although that was more like a gold rush in peoples living rooms. Unlike what we have today, a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute of the day. Dont gete wrong the desktop isnt going anywhere soon we just have a new poster child while the old one has mostly sorted all its teething problems out.
>a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute of the day.
- you are speaking of popularizing and monetizing the internet on mobile devices.
In the last dot-com, we were popularizing and monetizing the internet on desktops.
To someone that has lived through both? it looks pretty similar. Lots of dumb ideas that will crater, and a few good ones that will endure. (Of course, it's difficult to tell the difference now... but it will be clear once this business cycle turns downward.)
So yeah. Right now? there's a lot of investment hype (and thus a lot of media hype -- follow the money.) focusing on the folks who write software for the internet (or the internet on cellphones, now.)
Once the money falls back to 'normal' levels? yeah, the media will forget about us. We'll go back to being creepy nerds. After the first dot-com crash, there were a bunch of stories about nerds who became temporarily rich and blew their fortunes on stupid garbage. I think it was a lot like the schadenfreude of focusing on sports stars who ended up blowing their giant gains on fancy houses and cars that forced them into bankruptcy a few years later.
As a youngster? the takeaway should be "I don't know when this will end, but it probably won't last forever."
You need to get good experience while the getting is good. I used the first dot-com to work with some really great people; I still brag about stuff I did when I was 17.
Oh boy, the employment situation after the first dot-com crash? it was terrible. I mean, I was able to fight my way into the top 25% (and was able to exploit some connections) so I stayed employed... but as late as 2004, I was able to hire people I had worked with before; people that weren't worse than I was in 1998, for retail wages. I found one guy I had worked with making sandwiches at a deli. "I can't pay you what you're worth, but I can beat the deli." - this was less than a two hour train ride from silicon valley. And the guy really wasn't bad. Sometime around 2007-2008 he took over one of my (reasonably paying, by silicon valley standards) jobs and did pretty great. He's been fully employed at rates similar to what I would get working for other people since.
While I initially agree with you and can understand your view point based on your previous experience, I think there are two categories of tech:
-Business Value Add
-Hype / Marketing
I separate these out because we've already gone through a terrible economic downturn that is sputtering to produce jobs and yet we see an explosion of jobs in the tech sector. That's because of the value add software that is reducing the number of employees, paperwork or steps in a process a business needs in order to operate.
Those types of companies are going to be fine through another economic downturn because their clients have realized how much their saving by using the software. These value add tech businesses may see a slow down, but not a collapse.
The biggest example that is here to stay is E-Commerce. Look at how many companies / businesses are realizing how much easier / cheaper it is to go online than build a brick and mortar store with employees, rent, utilities, taxes, repairs, maintenance, etc.
Even some apps are here to stay. AirBNB, for example, is a personal value add when I'm traveling. I have no problem paying them a couple dollars to reduce my overall travel costs by 15-30%.
What will collapse almost overnight are the apps, websites, etc that are simply fluffy websites, marketing materials, or buggy unusable software.
My thought is stick with the people helping other people make or save money, and you'll be safe through the next one.
>I think there are two categories of tech: -Business Value Add -Hype / Marketing
It's harder to tell the difference than you think.
For an example, during the first dot-com, how about amazon? selling books online. Hurr hurr. what a great and revolutionary business plan. Hell, after the crash, for a while, I was selling books online, and writing software to automate warehouse operations. It's actually a really interesting space, if you ask me, but in 1997, well, to me it didn't look like a billion-dollar idea.
Turns out? it was one of those ideas (or implementations) that turned out to be a really good idea. It was not obvious that it was a good idea (or good implementation) at all, not until after the crash.
Or ebay. There was a sea of auction sites. A huge number of auction sites. It was not at all clear that ebay would continue on to be the marketplace of choice.
And for every amazon and ebay, there were a thousand imitators.
And what about Yahoo!? It sure looked like curated portals were the way to go. it looked like they would be the gateway to the internet. Nope.
AOL was in the same boat. It looked a lot like real value, but was, in fact, pyrite.
I think the biggest story is that the people who added the value that was most tangible? the telecoms who actually trenched in all the fiber? A huge number of those went bankrupt. And those are the companies, were I playing stocks at the time, I would have bought. Those companies seemed to be the 'real-estate' of the internet, as they owned the fiber in the ground. In a real sense, they owned they physical layer that the internet was built upon.
In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.
If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?
As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.