
Ask HN: How did the dot com bust affect develop salaries post 2000? - ferros
I was not yet a developer in 2000 when we went through the cycle of boom to bust.<p>Curious to know how developer salaries changed at the time. Looking for a reference point for if something similar was to happen again now.
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nostrademons
I had just started my career and hid out in college during most of the bust,
so I'm not a great source. I had double the salary when I got out of college
in 2005, but there's this huge conflating factor of having a CS degree from a
top school and a big volunteer project with 100K users under my belt.

From what I remember happening to coworkers & classmates, though: it was more
a crash of employment than of salaries. Basically, the dot-com boom allowed a
lot of people who lacked all the fundamentals to become highly-paid tech
workers in this VC-fueled machine. When the VC funding dried up, their
employers disappeared, they all got laid off, and many people exited tech
altogether. I know a number of people who graduated 99/00, and their resume
shows 1-2 years at a dot-com, followed by a 3-4 years stretch of temp jobs,
usually followed by grad school or a switch into some totally unrelated
profession. Their salary never really recovered, because they entered a field
that paid much less than the one they exited.

Most people I know who had 5-10 years of experience, a solid track record, and
really _enjoyed_ programming for its own sake did fine - in many cases, better
than they did before the bubble. Think about it: if you were laid off from a
dot-com in 2002 but lucky enough to get hoovered up by Google when they were
the only ones hiring, you are almost certainly retired now and probably have a
good-size family foundation to give away money. Similarly, I knew one other
engineer that got laid off from the dot-com where I worked, ended up doing
high-throughput transaction processing for an enterprise storage startup, and
made a few million on stock options when they were acquired. The really top-
end programmers who had the courage to persist when the industry was cratering
- think of Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish, or Joshua Schacter of del.icio.us, or
Evan Williams of Blogger, or the YouTube guys - ended up doing _really_ well,
and in several cases are now billionaires.

Basically, busts exacerbate inequality. Love what you do, keep doing it, and
find out how you can apply it so that other people genuinely benefit from it,
and you end up cleaning up on all the wealth that everybody else is too scared
to create. Flit between the hot new thing with just a superficial
understanding and you'll probably end up unemployed when it's no longer hot.

