
Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002? - wbsun
Would you mind sharing your stories?
======
johngalt
By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately
imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something
was 'a little off' and finding out that you were going to die in three months.
Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the
same disease.

Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A
few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn't
until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.

It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech
company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was
still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a
fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds
to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a
massive amount of damage to the industry.

You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during
2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career
professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the
collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was
missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc...
Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you'll often see no
sympathy for the 'talent shortage' complaint. Five years after cutting
everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers
demanding to know "where are all the people with five years of recent
experience"

~~~
throwawaybbq1
Your cohort point is particularly insightful. I had just started my career in
1999 .. I had a bad feeling about the situation and went to grad school right
away (after a year). Was a good move at the time because a year or two after I
started, good programs had a crazy number of applicants (which of course,
raises the bar to get in). Other than the grad school crowd and people who
braved unemployment, what did these professionals do? Get out of tech
completely?

Btw ... love the hn handle :)

~~~
johngalt
Yes in many cases they got out of tech. One of the nice things about tech
careers is that your floor is most other people's ceiling. Having tech skills
in the early 2000s created a large gap between you and other office workers.
Imagine if being able to read/write was a rare skill. It would make you
generally competitive in many areas, because you could learn and communicate
better than your peers.

I went into banking because I already knew a few people in the field and they
were desperate for people. Did really well, set a bunch of performance
records, put on track for various promotions/advancement. Strongly considered
never returning to tech despite it being my passion. Eventually I couldn't
stay away from tech, but it took some time.

It also discouraged many new students from entering CS programs. This is why
the 'talent shortage' lasted so long. It wasn't just a mass exodus of existing
tech pros, but also a sharp decline in people pursuing tech careers. The high
school class of 2002-2004 was much less likely to consider pursuing a tech
degree. This is the reason you can't find piles of skilled/cheap early career
programmers with 5 years experience in 2012. That means they would have
graduated in 2007 and selected their undergrad program in 2002-2003.

------
itamarst
Dot-com I worked for went down hard. Sysadmin was reading management's email
and telling people in advance they were going to get fired. Went from massive
office to nothing in just a few months.

Practical advice: save money and live below your means. This will let you
survive the next bust, whenever it happens, much better. It will also help you
survive a non-systemic layoff, and will help you find better jobs... it's
pretty much always a good idea.

[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/08/living-below-your-
me...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/08/living-below-your-means/)

~~~
throwawaybbq1
The biggest issue right now is rents. I have 2-3 friends who just signed 1
year leases for north of 3K for 1 bedrooms. My own evil apartment complex
(shitty place but Mountain View so what can you do) raised my rent and said I
could go back to the lower one if I sign another lease. While your advice is
sage, it isn't practical.

~~~
rhexs
If you aren't making enough money to save in Mountain View, perhaps consider
relocating to anywhere else in the country?

I'm guessing you have some other budgeting issues?

~~~
throwawaybbq1
My last apartment complex, the manager boosted how 2 bedroom apartments (going
for like 4K) were being shared by 3 engineers so it wasn't too bad. As an
older tech person whose room-mate days are over, this seems exploitative.

I do okay financially .. I just don't like getting fleeced. Also, few jobs in
tech are 100% secure (the point of this thread) so I have a problem with a
land owner who is intent to pass most of their risk over to me.

------
dsw108
People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation
is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on
one _dialup_ line, as a T1 was really expensive. We had to take turns
downloading files. This was in San Mateo, California, not the middle of
nowhere. The sysadmins once put out a request to the developers one time to
physically show up and help move all of the servers. Our colo site got mad at
us because we packed so many servers in that it overtaxed their air
conditioning. Who buys their own servers now?

Now everybody is connected. You really can expect a huge number of normal non-
technical people to be able to use your website to do everyday mundane tasks
like hail a cab or order food. As Marc points out, all the stupid ideas from
the bubble all work now. In 2000, selling pet food online was stupid. Now
people buy so much online that physical retail businesses that sell generic
stuff like pet food are going out of business.

Not sure if I can can communicate how utterly strange the internet was to most
people in 1998. There had never been anything like it. People knew it would
change everything, and they were right. It just needed a decade and a half for
everyone to get network, get a client machine they liked (iPhone), and learn
how to use it. I think Marc is right: this is the deployment phase of the
technology. I do not think there will ever be another internet bubble. The
next bubble will be in some new technology that does not work yet, like
biotech or self-driving cars.

Or, maybe people are now so well-informed and information is in such a tight
feedback loop that there will never be that kind of bubble _ever_ again.
Bubbles come from ignorance and a slow feedback loop. People forget how hard
it was to find information in the past: you literally had to know where to
physically go to get it. Now some dude in rural China can find out more about
the meeting schedule of subcommittees the North Dakota legislature next week
while sitting on the toilet than most people in North Dakota could in 1995
without at the very least making a bunch of phone calls all the time or living
in Bismarck and going to the capital ever day:
[http://www.legis.nd.gov/](http://www.legis.nd.gov/) I was so confident of
that sentence that I guessed that to be true and only searched for the site
after writing that sentence: yup, there's an app for that.

~~~
fundabulousrIII
Who buys their own servers now? Well that is funny in a sad way. You may be
looking at this in ten years and hopping to another lily pad.

Anyone who needs 4 9's or better has some kind of hardware presence even if
they are heavily invested in the cloud. Full stack (hardware->development) SAs
are a vanishing breed but I am one of them. I can spend 24k a year on colo
with 150K invested in hardware and beat the hell out of cloud providers long
term...for now.

------
1dundundun
I was a technical sales manager at a fast growing ISP focused on selling T1,
DS3 and "business grade" DSL. The money was good. It felt like we were on top
of the world. Embarrassingly, looking back, the movie that best describes our
culture/ environment back then was Boiler Room. It's one of Vin Diesel's last
movies before becoming a star w/ the Fast & Furious series and it's streaming
on Youtube if you're ever interested. Different industry but same vibe. Most
of us were recent grads from no name schools. There were also a few dropouts
and a few who never attempted college. Depending on where you live, this would
be the equivalent of coming out of school in your 20's w/ very few skills to
make a doctor's salary almost 20 years ago.

Towards the end, every week for a few months, we'd talk/ read about mass
firings or competitors shutting down completely. The writing was on the wall
when the CEO brought in the PE guy (who still maintained his role at the PE
shop he came from) in as a VP to "tighten things up".I was too young and naive
to recognize what that meant but his role was to come in and get the company
ready to be acquired or parted out like an old car at the junkyard. Yup, we
were being prepared for the slaughter.

That last day was tough. We knew it was coming but didn't know when. Working
under that type of environment is a tough feeling to describe. Big cardboard
boxes on everyones desk one morning, along w/ an offer to take or leave was
devastating & relieving at the same time. I took the offer and used the cash
to start a company.

Some never recovered. Some had picked up bad habits (cars, alcohol, coke, fast
life) while the money was flowing, making it harder when the cash dried up. I
always lived a low key existence. I never appreciated it more than when our
world stopped spinning.

------
pdjoyce
A magazine (Fortune, The Industry Standard?) ran an article about the
declining prices of dotcom IPOs and included the sentence, “It can go down to
zero.” That was correct.

------
lambdafan
The highways were empty and I spent my time playing Vampire LARP in downtown
Palo Alto , or talking with my friends about larping. There were no jobs
anywhere and I almost moved out of state. However, I decided to stay and take
the consequences. It worked out for me, but I occasionally see some people I
knew from back in the day. They never bounced back.

~~~
ido
How long did it remain empty? Did real-estate prices crash?

~~~
rficcaglia
Commercial yes, but housing no. Houses leveled off briefly. It meant that
instead of having to make an offer 50% over asking and literally beg in a
personal letter to the owners, you could make a 10% over offer and leave it to
the agent.

------
cableshaft
I was in college at the time. I remember people saying during that time, once
you graduate with a Computer Science degree, you'll get 45k a year starting
salary, easy!

And then the bubble popped and they were like "Oops! Nevermind!"

Nowadays that number seems low.

~~~
ido
I was 18 in 2001 and started my first job as a programmer at the nadir of the
bust (October '01).

I got the job via some personal contacts, it was in an academic institute and
I was making barely over minimum wage (probably why there wasn't much
competition for it). It wasn't really even an open position but when I asked
around they had the budget to hire someone to help the physics phds with their
non-research tasks.

I started studying CS at uni the next year ('02) and it was much easier to get
in than previously, cause there were far fewer applicants. By the time I got
my first job with a more decent salary it was 2005 and the worst of the bust
already cleared away - so I guess I somehow managed to skip it altogether.

------
rficcaglia
Before: Mt. View cinemas with pre movie recruiting ads with sign on offers of
a new car.

After: Ads for used routers and switches and office furniture.

------
sixQuarks
I went through the whole dot com boom and collapse. The weirdest thing was
driving on 101 during rush hour and it being empty.

------
fundabulousrIII
It was shit. You took pay cuts to stay on a job or you left the field.
Personally I worked through it but it was not fun and eventually had to leave
the position anyway. Adrift in 2003 and thankfully late 2004 showed up and
government started hiring contractors. Otherwise I would be making 40K a year
teaching PE at a middle school.

------
MandieD
Eagerly taking the sort of Beltway Bandit contracting job that we had mocked
in 1999 when I graduated in 2002. Windowless basement in a '70s government
building in suburban Maryland with the office furniture the government
employees had rejected, writing and tracking Java unit tests, and I was
deliriously grateful.

------
V-eHGsd_
oh man, there was a lot going on back then. enron's rolling blackouts in
california, 9/11, gray davis' recall, my roommate telling me that now was the
time to invest because there was no way tdfx could go lower ...

what a time to be alive.

------
dsw108
The Valley hit the floor so fast that the auction company selling off what was
left of our startup just combined the auction with that of another startup in
the same building that hit the floor at the same time.

------
psyc
A number of colleagues had become rich very quickly and "retired". When the
bubble burst, I realized that the money rush was over, and my lotto number had
not been drawn. However, within 2 years, most of those colleagues were selling
their sports cars and looking for work again.

------
joezydeco
fuckedcompany.com on 6-hour refresh.

------
spog314
Do you think we're in a bubble and it'll burst?

~~~
bdibs
Of course, do you not?

------
cyrks
pink slip parties

