
Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst? - kace91
I&#x27;m a youngish developer (28y&#x2F;o), and the constant recent  comments of people predicting a new burst have made me curious about how life changed for developers at the time, and maybe what to expect if such a thing were to happen again.<p>I&#x27;ve heard stories of rich startup founders losing everything back then, but not much about what happened with the average devs. What was it like, living through those times? Did many people change careers? was there still a thriving industry in less risky tech companies? did salaries drop? I&#x27;m basically clueless about the whole thing.
======
reuven
I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.)
When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a
job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that
HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed
every hire carefully.

He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a
recession, everyone at HP -- all the way up and down the ladder -- worked 9
days out of 10, and took a 10% salary cut, in order to ensure that there
wouldn't be any layoffs.

People spoke about the company, and how it treated employees, with great
pride, and the way that they treated workers during hard times was one major
reason for that.

If nothing else, I learned from these stories that the boss/owner should be
paid _last_ , after all of the employees receive their salaries. I've done
that whenever I've had employees, and I credit that lesson not just to general
business ethics, but to a sense that business is about much more than just
profit.

It's hard to imagine a modern company taking such steps to avoid layoffs, but
the story continues to inspire me nearly 30 years later.

~~~
Havoc
>the boss/owner should be paid last

Yup. My dad is big on that too. Always thought he overplayed it, but one day
he explained that the people he employs are quite poor. So if they don't get
paid they can't put food on the table - literally. While he has a bit more of
a buffer.

~~~
CSMastermind
Leaders Eat Last. A very good book by Simon Sinek but based on an old Marine
Corps principal.

While other services have 'head of line privileges' \- basically the more
senior you are the more you can cut in line to get food at chow time. In the
Marines, you always line up most junior to more senior.

It drives home the responsibility leaders have to take care of the people who
follow them.

~~~
matwood
Exactly. This also extends further. I have led and managed, and always try to
take on the least appealing work while letting those I managed do the 'fun'
work.

------
phd514
I was ~1.5 years out of college and at a small dot-com with a niche SaaS at
the time. I distinctly remember 9/11 and the chill that came over our office
that day. That passed in time, but our economic prospects never recovered. I
used to hit the gym in the mornings and then work ~10am-7pm and I distinctly
remember the day ~9 months later when the VP of engineering called me on my
cell while I was finishing up my workout and asked when I would be in the
office. He said to come straight to his office when I got in. About 85% of the
company was laid off that day and I was among the "lucky" ones who was not.

What followed was almost straight out of the Silicon Valley sitcom. Management
know our existing product was a dead-end, but with 85% of the company laid
off, our remaining VC funds gave us a decent runway, so they decided to pivot
to ... something. That is, the entire company (about ~15 of us) would sit
around in the boardroom and try to come up with new product ideas. Needless to
say, that went precisely nowhere.

The CEO was pushed out fairly shortly after that and I had been brought in
through his network. My layoff came about ~6 months later in the second round
of layoffs which constituted only me. Thanks to the VP of engineering going to
bat for me, I did get 3 months of severance. I spent 9 months looking for
another job and finally found one in fintech in NYC which turned out the be,
to this day, one of the best jobs of my career. I also met my now-wife and
many of my best friends there. That time was both the most traumatic
experience of my working career and the best thing to happen to me at the same
time. I know it was much harder on many other people, but it turned out for
the best for me.

~~~
adrianmonk
I know of one company that actually managed to pull off the pivot thing!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint)

They switched from an internet appliance (kind of like an early Chromebook) to
smart deep packet inspection firewalls. Not a ton in common between those
except that they both require hardware to be built.

If I remember right, local lore was that they pulled it off partly by
realizing early that they needed to change direction and being well-funded
enough that they had enough cash to start over.

~~~
ido
Didn't slack start as a game studio?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_\(software\)#History)

~~~
forgotmypwd123
So did Flickr. Same guy behind it too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield)

------
patio11
Offered in the spirit of "don't believe everything you hear": I went into
university and graduated during the post-bust winter. The few adults I knew,
plus the Wall Street Journal, were unanimous in their opinion that engineering
as a field was done in the United States and that all future hiring of
software developers would happen in Asia.

I got on a plane to Japan immediately after graduation. It's been a fun and
fulfilling 15 years, but I am reliably informed that there have, in fact, been
engineers hired in the United States since then.

~~~
kefabean
I remember a Partner from the large global consulting firm that I worked for
telling me a similar story: “There is no point getting in to engineering as it
will all be offshored to Asia; much better to become a project mgr that
‘glues’ delivery together”. Since that point I always regretted not doubling
down on engineering and have spent the rest of my career trying to become more
technical.

~~~
kls
Yep I remember them scare mongering with that line. Which really gutted the
already short supply of developers available. I also remember when the
outsourcing wave came crashing down on their dreams of cheap development labor
and they had to come back hat in hand to US developers who understand US
business processes to bail them out. BOA being a big one that's project busted
spectacularly. Most of us that witnessed this period held their feet to the
fire and jacked up our rates, due to the limited supply of developers.

------
jonahbenton
Will briefly share my story, then offer advice:

I was VP Tech at a high profile ad driven startup. We raised $50M (Softbank
money in those days). Spent a lot of it scaling up on Sun hardware, ran TV
ads, saw tremendous response, then a week later the bottom in the ads business
model dropped out. Literally a week later. Amazing.

We went from close to 300 staff in March (60 of which reported to me) to 7 in
October. The CEO handled the layoffs.

Most of the developers who reported to me took months to find new jobs.

Many of the non-tech people who had found unique jobs in our business were not
able to find similar work again and went to business school or law school.

I had worked day and night to scale up, then worked day and night to scale
down. I burned out. I moved, stopped working for pay, lived on savings, went
to grad school (in CS) for a while, then finally got back on the horse in
2005.

Some advice- worrying about the next bubble bursting is a distraction, like
following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question, but the right
plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and whether there is a
bubble or not is kind of irrelevant.

You might lose your job in the midst of major investment, or you might weather
repeated rounds of layoffs. Random things will happen uniquely to YOU. They
have to all of us.

The average story is helpful context but it is not your story. Protect and
defend yourself. You are the only one who can.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I would emphasize this: _worrying about the next bubble bursting is a
distraction, like following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question,
but the right plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and
whether there is a bubble or not is kind of irrelevant._

Internalizing that can be the best thing any developer does. It is way more
impressive to talk about all the skills you have acquired in your career in an
interview than it is to talk about how your last company crashed and burned
and you rode it right into the ground.

Make your plans for how you want to advance your career, what you want to
learn, what field you want to work in, the companies that are places where you
could pick up relevant skills. And plan for things you could do in the down
time between jobs.

~~~
H8crilA
Interestingly this is also the attitude of many money managers (Warren
Buffett, to take the best known example). You'd think at least they would take
explicit, timed preventive action. Many (most?) of them don't.

~~~
tardo99
I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say about Buffett, but he's sitting
on a gigantic pile of cash right now. He knows which way the wind is blowing.

~~~
nicholas73
Not sure this is a result of crash planning, or that good deals are hard to
find at the top and he won't pony up unless it's a good deal.

------
MentallyRetired
I worked at a company called Hydrogen Media in St Pete, Florida. We had a bell
that would ring only when we got a million dollar deal. It rang multiple times
a day.

Our office was insane. Exposed rafters with the trusses and everything painted
black. Our walls were deep blue but had blue neon running the length of the
room on all sides. No overhead lighting.

Our developer floor was elevated with sub-floor network cabling. We had a dev
floor about 100 yards by 50 yards, the size of a football field, roughly. A
little shy of that. Private offices had glass walls facing the dev floor. Our
sound studio (these were the flash days) was a hollowed-out VW bus in a
soundproofed room.

We had a fire pole from the bosses office down to the dev room, conference
tables with in-layed TVs. It was pretty wild.

In my time there, I built ~400 replicated sites for Colliers realty, DuPont
Registry's website, a bunch of websites for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the
Tampa Bay Lightning's website among others. We were printing money.

The crash hit hard, and Hydrogen Media dwindled. Massive layoffs, and
eventually it renamed to Bayshore Solutions and relocated to Tampa where they
still do business to this day.

~~~
geuis
Damn. I’m surprised I never heard of you guys at the time. I was 20ish around
that time living in St Pete. Was seriously looking for an “internet job” at
the time even though I had almost no advanced experience. Things sure have
changed since, especially since I moved to SF a few years later.

------
heelix
It was a rough point in time. In the dot com boom, people who could rub two
lines of visual basic (for applications) were getting jobs. If you did not
like your job, you could make a phone call and have a few offers waiting for
you by the end of the day. Glorious stock options at promising startups after
fleecing larger companies in panics about y2k and missing the boom. The
parties and travel...

We were joking about the pets.com of the world - buying pet food, selling it
at a loss, and trying to make up for it in volume. At least we had a business
model that made money, a foosball table, and actual personal offices for each
developer. When the stock market tanked... everything just shut down. People
stopped buying or investing - and anything that assumed growth, for the most
part, died. Starbucks with long, long queue lanes were empty.

As some companies died, there were opportunistic shops that were looking for
solid talent. As they sold off our little shop of ten people, I ended up
getting an offer and then being one of the folks left behind to turn the
server room lights off. I had negotiated a start date a few months into the
future, and very thankfully, they honored the offer. Things got worse. There
were several more bits of belt tightening - we had a 25% round of layoffs
later as the impacts of a bad economy really hit home. I did well/got lucky -
but while the first round cleared out a lot of 'charlatans', I saw many solid
people go on that black Friday

Salaries dropped - or at least stopped growing for most senior people. The
rise of off-shore came and the realities of global economies eventually
settled in. Large swaths of people turned their back on development... and
here we are today, where it can be tricky to find solid folks again. The Wheel
of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.
Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave
it birth comes again.

~~~
rubicon33
> In the dot com boom, people who could rub two lines of visual basic (for
> applications) were getting jobs. If you did not like your job, you could
> make a phone call and have a few offers waiting for you by the end of the
> day.

Yea, that doesn't sound anything like today!

/sarcasm

~~~
davidjnelson
There was no “grinding leetcode” in the late 90s...

~~~
kasi
What were SWE interviews and interview prep like back in late 90s/early 00s?

~~~
NeedMoreTea
UK experience. Turn up, usually do some sort of coding or skill test - which
was mostly on paper and consisted of about half an hour or so worth of
questions. Starting with a few gifts like an obvious error, or "explain
encapsulation", through to 2 or 3 bastards that were probably the current
department's idea of funny. 30min - 1.5 hr interview, usually with a quick
wander round the department or building. Not uncommon to get an offer as we
wrap up. No prep - just know the company you apply to, and know your stuff.

A few were still just interview with no test. Some would have a second round -
mostly corporates, which were mostly a repeat of round one but with someone
else. In that era I can remember just one whiteboard interview, which also
required a surprise _presentation._ I passed, but didn't want to proceed. The
interview put me right off them. :)

On the interviewing side it was actually depressingly common to have one or
two turn up and hard fail the easy gifts, and completely fail to explain
encapsulation, or know what a constructor was etc. There were quite a few
trying to wing it with a couple of years C++ or Java on the CV when they maybe
sort-of knew a bit of C and fancied a bit of the absurd y2k and dot com money
that TV kept on about.

------
MandieD
I graduated in 2002, took a "Beltway Bandit" consulting job testing Java code
for a Treasury project in a basement in Hyattsville, MD, watched my older
friends who graduated in 2000 into dotcom pay struggle to keep up payments on
their Porsches, and counted my blessings for being able to pay my student
loans and foolish new car purchase.

Two years later, I took a US Army contracting job in Germany, and through a
couple of twists and turns, have been in the IT department of a large German
auto parts manufacturer for eight years now... where we just got our 40 hour
contracts cut to 35. My husband (engineer) and I live about the same lifestyle
that our neighbors who are secretaries and mechanics do, so finances will not
be a problem unless we're both unemployed for over a year.

My advice: don't take on unnecessary expenses that you would have a hard time
backing out of (big car note) or that would tie you to a place (mortgage on
something that would be hard to sell for what you owe), and think hard about
what are needs (eating healthy food, recreation) and what are wants and
conveniences (having prepared food brought to you, expensive activities and
exotic travel). Go ahead and enjoy your wants a bit while times are good, but
be ready to cut them out when the punchbowl gets taken away.

~~~
gunglefunk
I was working at Treasury in Hyattsville around that time (in the basement as
a matter of fact, where I think most of the contractors lived) but that was my
first job after getting away from all of the .com bubble-busting BS.

Salaries were still pretty good (but flat) for those pros who stuck around and
had actual technical skill, but a lot of the newer people to technology had it
much rougher.

~~~
MandieD
HPTi?

------
im_down_w_otp
I graduated from college right amidst the bubble bursting, and it was brutal.
Fresh college grads and junior developers were competing with displaced
veterans for entry-level positions. ~1 year prior I had been offered $120k/yr
to drop out of school and move to Pittsburgh to take a job. I decided to stay
in school to finish my degree instead, and by the time I did the bottom of the
market had fallen out and I was unemployed for 7 months and finally landed my
first professional software development job in Washington State for less than
half the salary of the job I'd previously declined.

I thankfully had my CAD/CAM background & contracting to fallback on while
hunting for those 7 months, but it was enormously demotivating &
disenfranchising. I was within a couple weeks of just abandoning a career in
software entirely and going back to what I knew permanently.

I expect it all worked out in the end, as I'm now CEO of a startup doing a
thing I'm really interested in and have successfully raised money to fund it
along side our early revenue. But, it was still immensely crappy at the time
and shocking to see just how extreme the pendulum can swing in terms of
available jobs, pay scales, etc.

~~~
kevstev
My experience was very similar- I was working on my resume the morning of 9/11
at the start of my senior year. My friends and I all boasted about how we
would refuse to even entertain any offers below 75k prior and several had
already secured offers at the end of their summer internships.

The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern
under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years experience in specific
stacks I was competing against. Most offers that were secured were rescinded.

I was somewhat fortunate- I did not plan on going back to the place I interned
at, but facing no other prospects I reached out and they offered me a job- for
literally 37k. I swallowed my pride and took it- it was a small consulting
firm, close to my house, and they had just scored a new project for a major
sports organization.

I kept looking on the side in hopes to get a better offer, but got literally
zero bites on it. After one year there (and my boss tried to get me excited
about a 3,000 but 10% raise) I got my first actual response to a submitted
resume for a place that seemed terrible. The month after that I got a second
call, that didn't work out. The month after that a third callback- and they
made an offer on the spot- for 55k. I was over the moon- it was at least a
living wage, and working in finance for a group that was working on what would
later be called high frequency trading.

Things picked up from there, but I didn't hit that 75k mark for another year
or so.

~~~
IggleSniggle
It’s funny to hear stories like this, because I didn’t begin my career as a
software dev and 37k would have seemed like incredible money to me fresh out
of college in ‘06. My first job, I was making 21k and I felt pretty ok about
it. I’m making an order of magnitude more now, but I’m grateful for learning
how to be happy on a 21k salary. Literally everything over that feels like
excess that I could do without if need be. Makes it easy to choose the work
that I actually want to do, too.

~~~
kevstev
That must have been in a LCOL area... 37k was not enough to move out of my
parents house comfortably... 55k was, at least I could live with roommates and
still save a bit- I was in NYC though.

------
shaftway
I was at ask.com during the crash. The first bad part for me was the options.
I planned on selling them the instant they vested. A week before vesting they
were trading in the low hundred dollar range. The day they vested they were in
the dollar range, with a strike price of 10 dollars. Thank goodness I didn't
exercise them or I'd be stuck in the tax boat. So it was demoralizing, but I
still had my salary, and I was young enough for that to be enough.

I weathered three rounds of layoffs and that was pretty harsh too. Every
morning we'd check fuckedcompany.com and look for Ask in there. One morning it
popped up with a 60% layoff in two days. It was almost exactly right; 16% of
staff were laid off. Someone mis-heard the number.

I was in a smaller off-shoot office, so when people were cut they were called
into the managers office, and while there security would pack their desk. When
they came out of the office the box was just sitting on the floor, right
outside the door. By the second round the manager just wouldn't come in that
day, and the main office would send some stranger to do it.

At first I rationalized the people who were cut as people who weren't
valuable, weren't adding to the bottom line. They were the less technical
people, and their jobs were more nebulous, so it was easy to ease any mental
pangs. It was a way of coping with something similar to survivor's guilt. Then
when I was laid off, well, it was a tough time for me personally. I couldn't
help applying the same rationale to myself. I wasn't valuable. I wasn't adding
to the bottom line. The company is better off without me.

They gave me a pretty nice severance check. I convinced them to keep me on for
another week to document my project. It was actually one of the only cash-
positive projects at the company, due to contracts with Visa and Nike. That
extra week pushed me into 2 years of tenure, which bumped my severance from
two months pay to three.

I did not do anything mature with the money.

Generally the attitude I saw was to hunker down and try to weather the storm.
Nobody interviewed because nobody could get recruiters to answer the phone.
And nobody wanted their manager to think they were interviewing; that was a
great way to be called in first during the next round. And lots of late nights
working; gotta show you're still committed, despite everything crumbling
around you.

~~~
mattrp
+1 for reminding me about fuckedcompany.com — that was the first thing I read
every morning. We didn’t pop up on it but I heard the news of our layoffs on
the radio that morning when I was driving in - we were public and it was a
pretty big layoff. As for what life was like after, my wife was pitching in
midtown NYC on 9/11\. It took her a week to drive back home. I knew a lot of
founders who for many months kept pitching VC’s after 9/11 like everything was
going to turn around the next day. I remember one who was just floored when a
VC literally said to him: look, I took this meeting to do you a favor: stop
pitching. Seriously. Anyway I don’t think it was until 2005-2006 before I
stopped looking over my shoulder for news of layoffs in whatever job I had.

~~~
jquinby
Man alive I lived on that site during those years. If you don't remember or if
it was before your time: people anonymously posted internal emails, layoff
notices, and so on. Some of them (the Cerner "tick-tock" email comes to mind -
though it looks like it appeared on a Yahoo board first) were legendary. And
the FC forums...oofah.

~~~
notJim
[https://www.bizcominthenews.com/files/cerner-1.pdf](https://www.bizcominthenews.com/files/cerner-1.pdf)

------
davismwfl
I went through it, and started a company soon after it crashed and then a
couple more during the downturn. Ironically a lot of money can be made in
downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it.

What I saw and experienced was enterprise devs basically just kept doing what
they did. Startup devs that could went into (or back in some cases) to
enterprises. Enterprises used it as an opportunity to snag up good devs at a
bit of a discount in many cases.

To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not
more so than other professions. One nice side affect I thought was that the
crash cleared out most of the people claiming they were developers but had no
real experience or talent. Most of my friends and people I worked with were
fine and at worst might have gone back to an enterprise gig or in many cases
were already there and didn't really miss a beat.

IMHO, if we have a crash this time (versus just a softening market), it will
be similar as the need for quality software devs won't disappear. It will take
longer to find a position in general and there won't be as much money floating
around but decent developers are not going to have a hard time putting food on
the table or finding work. Remote work will suffer, pay will suffer and VC
dollars will drop dramatically, but the average developer will be fine.

~~~
michaelt
_> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least
not more so than other professions._

My anecdote is the opposite: My father was an engineer at a company that made
machines for semiconductor manufacturing.

They had a physical product, customers liked them, they sold each machine at a
profit - none of the obvious-with-hindsight folly of companies like Pets.com.

However, when the dot-com bust happened they went out of business anyway.
Turns out the collapse of the likes of Pets.com dropped the demand for
semiconductors from the point where every wafer manufacturer wanted to expand
capacity to the point where no-one wanted to. Boom, no orders. And of course,
some investors when they see 'tech stocks' are falling, will sell your stock
even if your business is much less speculative than the likes of Pets.com.

There were three lessons I learned:

1\. Your business may be nothing like Pets.com and may seem to have strong
fundamentals - but if the bottom falls out of tech stocks, you can end up
unemployed anyway.

2\. When the going gets tough, satellite offices get hit before head office.

3\. If you have car/mortgage/credit card payments, you can get insurance that
covers the payments if you lose your job. A lot of the time this isn't a good
investment - but once the company started laying people off and everyone could
see the writing on the wall, people with debt brought gold-plated insurance
and were glad they did.

~~~
dsr_
One more note for your first lesson: you might have a hot product that you
sell at a product, but your own salespeople can kill you.

Lucent (AT&T spun them off to commercialize things from Bell Labs) had the
absolute best product of the late 90s/early 2000: the Ascend MAX DSLAM/modem
bank. Before that, an ISP needed T1 phone lines (24 channels) plugged into a
CSU plugged into 24 modems plugged into a chassis that would emit serial that
would be plugged into a router, along with a server that would do
authentication and logging for billing and IP assignment. The Ascend MAX
turned all of that into one box: phone connections to ethernet and all
services provided and remotely administrated. Insanely great.

The problem was that Lucent's salespeople were very good, and the market for
new ISPs was huge -- everybody was starting one or expanding their available
markets -- so Lucent started offering financing.

When you finance your house or car, your loan is backed by the asset: the
house or car still has some large percentage of the loan value at any given
time, even with depreciation.

When you finance your ISP equipment purchase, Lucent assumed that they could
always repo the MAX and sell it at a discount to some other growing ISP.

They didn't count on the ISP market collapsing.

------
ping_pong
I worked through the tail end of the dotcom boom and saw all of the dot com
bust.

My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs
decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have
coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on
H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit
cards just to stay alive. Entire technology parks were abandoned wastelands.

Even worse was that the idea of "outsourcing" to India started up during this
time. So not only we were losing our jobs, the thought was that we could
possibly be losing our jobs forever, because why wouldn't the engineers in
India be just as effective for 1/5 the price? The per-capita job loss in
Silicon Valley was worse than Detroit in the 80s, and the job losses were so
bad that the traffic on 101 was actually okay.

I honestly felt like my way of life was dead, I even went to the hospital for
a panic attack. Take into considering that while the wages for software
engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now. I was making good
money, almost 6 figures, and it felt like I might have to find a new job in
less than 5 years. It felt like a very dire situation.

After a couple of years, things started to stabilize, and it didn't feel so
dire. However, I think people who went through the bust like I did were
naturally reticent about joining companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc
which were the next wave of companies that defined Silicon Valley so we missed
out on a lot of upside.

~~~
digb
Why do you think the outsourcing never got quite as bad as everyone expected?

~~~
sizzle
You get what you pay for, high quality code costs money and off shore talent
will generally immigrate to first world countries if they have the talent
cause of wage suppression abroad for the same skillset. My 2 cents

~~~
digb
I think the other commenter is probably closer to accuracy. Here in NYC,
offshoring to Chile/DR and other countries in the same timezone is
surprisingly popular, even for early stage startups. The idea that people will
just immigrate is a bit of a stretch. Coming from an immigrant family I will
tell you that some of the most talented people stayed behind while others got
lucky. My $0.02, just like anyone else's, and I know people currently in India
launching really great code schools, but the talent argument never held in my
mind.

------
Zaskoda
Backdrop: I was inspired by games and went to CS undergrad with the hopes of
becoming a videogame developer and ultimately a designer/director. I started
college just as BBS distribution gave way to the World Wide Web; I had to
learn HTML in order to distribute my shareware games.

Moonshots: I dropped out of school with only a year left to graduate because
the Web development startup I launched with two of my friends was getting out
of control. We were charging over $100/hr in the 90s and still having to turn
down clients. We worked on amazing projects I can barely remember and made a
pile of cash. But we were kids and couldn't get along so we split. I joined
another startup that got bought out and put more cash in my pocket which led
to me following leadership to yet another startup... that died pretty hard in
the Fall of 2001.

Aftermath: Money, parties, travel, and then boom... it was over. Although I
had been an irresponsible child with my earnings, I had the good fortune of
having some saved some before I was laid off - and I could collect
unemployment benefits.

Like everyone else, I couldn't find work anywhere. There was a flash cartoon
back then called "Laid off: a day in the life". Good times, good times. I went
back to school to finish earning my BS in CS. While in school I tried
desperately to get a job in the service industry. I couldn't even land a job
waiting tables. Managers told me that they had plenty of people that could
work at any time and they didn't want to fuss with people who had school
schedules. One manager told me he had over 1,500 applicants at his new
restaurant. After having held a Director title in 2001, I ended up starting
over again with a fresh degree and a job as a Jr Videogame Programmer in 2003.
At least I was working on videogames instead of web! (spoiler, I'm back in
web, but that's another story)

I still don't think I've fully come to terms with the unrealistic expectations
I developed early in my career. I rose to success quickly because I had a head
start in web tech just as the industry around it was taking off. After the
crash I had to work hard for things like everyone else which means coming to
terms with the realization that I am not as special as I thought I was.

~~~
Zaskoda
The cartoon if anyone is interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dMFM-
Jqji0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dMFM-Jqji0)

~~~
at-fates-hands
This just solved a huge mystery for me.

One of my first managers I had after becoming a developer used to say,
"Listen, if you don't get your stuff done, you're going to be having fudge
stripes and pringles for breakfast, ok!?" All of us junior devs had no idea
what the hell he was talking about.

I always thought, "That doesn't sound too bad to me."

It was actually a reference to this cartoon. Thanks for solving a 10 year old
mystery for me!!

~~~
IggleSniggle
For what’s its worth, it beats frickin workin

------
cleandreams
I had 12 years at a major tech company, then I contracted for awhile. Before
the bust I felt like a film star fielding calls whenever I was looking for
work. Fun is the word; I was so in demand. When the bust hit I was actually
choosing to take some time off (and taking classes). After that I was the only
person in my Java class who got a job, out of 35 or so, and that job was one
third my previous contractor hourly, and it was intermittent. On, off, on,
off, with that small company. One of my friends in my class was unemployed for
two years. I live in SF and the Mission had been flooded with bright young
wannabes with shiny degrees, and they all disappeared during the bust. One
horrifying thing happened that I was close to. The small company that I had
gotten a gig with went under and the CEO committed suicide. That was a few
months after my final check. He was a brilliant and funny guy. I have had a
lovely run of success lately and I try to remember how much of it is luck plus
timing. Also we underestimate the true hardness of hard times. Best to be
appreciative.

------
Ididntdothis
I went from being a hotshot who had multiple offers all the time with sign up
bonuses to somebody who could send out 100 resumes and not get a single
response and once I got a response I was offered much less than I was used to.
It was very depressing but also educational. It took me quite a while
(probably too long) to accept this new reality. I feel the same may happen to
a lot of Startup guys who make big money in their 20s now.

Not all success is your own making. Often you are just riding a wave that
takes you up but will also take you down if you are not careful.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
> It was very depressing but also educational.

Indeed. When 2008 hit, it was reminiscent of what ~2002 felt like, except
instead of tech it was basically happening to everyone. In that way I felt
more prepared to deal with the new crisis because I'd learned from the old
one.

~~~
ip26
What did you learn?

~~~
im_down_w_otp
Several things:

\- Any news about a "recovery" has nothing to do with the reality you are
likely facing.

\- The worst of it is in the long-tail, not necessarily the initial shock.

\- The change in the market from, "We can grow our way out of anything!" to,
"Quick! Circle the wagons and lay low." happens a lot more suddenly than you
expect, but there are also warning signs.

\- You're super valuable and totally super employable right up until the
moment that you're not, and in the wrong place at the wrong time you have no
control and almost no influence over changing that, so be prepared to weather
it or jump ship.

\- Super high software developer salaries seem somehow correlated to VC-
pumping, and when the market fundamentals kick in, you're likely to find
yourself facing steep cuts, so live like you're a mechanical engineer, not a
lottery winner.

~~~
pjmlp
\- Value the team not the employer, you might meet them again elsewhere, while
the employer might fire you at the first crisis.

------
mikasjoman
After reading this thread, now I get why /r/financialindependence is so full
of IT guys like me. We got so roasted during 2001, that we never ever again
want to be dependent on our cosy well paying jobs we know not to take for
granted. I think FIRE is mostly an insurance for us who has seen those dark
days. Like 50% of the other swedes working in IT, I got kicked out of the
trade for many years. Moved to China, had a crazy wild life there, married
there and moved back to Sweden after 12 years. Currently work in one of the
four big IT consulting firms. After the 2001 IT bubble/crash, I still today
fear that the crash will come again and wipe us out. Today I grow a healthy
sized emergency fund and my investment portfolio is very hedged against a
stock market crash. I suggest the same to anyone who asks me for advice.

~~~
appleiigs
what is FIRE?

~~~
MattSayar
Financial Independence (Retire Early). ie have a ton of money saved up and
invested to live off the interest without working.

------
shams93
Got stuck with a huge tax bill on my stock options when Yahoo went under, took
10 years of brutal back to back contracts to pay it off. The state didn't care
that I had nowhere near the opportunities again they just mercilessly hammered
me for taxes until I paid it off a couple years ago but took nearly 15 years
to pay off the tax debt and meanwhile I could invest in nothing else.

~~~
DanTheManPR
I've seen something similar to this in other responses in this thread, how
exactly does one get a big tax bill for your stock options while
simultaneously not being able to pay them off? I'm not understanding something
about the situation.

~~~
testfoobar
Taxes on equity and option grants are complex beasts [ISO/NSO/RSU, Conversions
between ISOs to NSOs, Income vs. Cap Gains, AMT, 83(b) elections, Exercised vs
Non-exercised, Vesting schedules, etc]. Unless you personally understand the
nuances in everyone of these cases, you should 100% work with a tax
professional (and if you do understand, you are probably a tax professional!).

Here is an earlier discussion on taxes on options:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020063)

------
palad1n
I worked at a place starting 1998 that blew through 48 million dollars in the
span of two years. I was employee no. 7, and we grew in those two years to
250+, offices in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and New York City. I remember the
crash where my project manager was not looking too hot one day and he told me
he had lost $100K in stock valuation the day before. We all had thought we
were going to be rich. In 2001 I quit because I was so stressed out. I mean, I
would walk to work through sunny SF thinking, "Please, let a car hit me
today". Not that I was doing anything stupid toward that end, and not that I
wanted to die; just wanted to be laid up in the hospital for a while.

I quit in May, the company died a painful death about a couple months after
that. I heard it was pandemonium there. They simply could not raise any more
money. Plain and simple. But of course, I had no severance and no
unemployment.

But whatever. It was what it was. I basically got stoned and played video
games for the next 5 months. I really needed that. Fortunately I had some
money saved away because at that time I wasn't doing anything with stock
trading. So there was that.

From October to February I looked for a job, and got hired at a pretty good
place, but wow the sentiment was completely different.

~~~
elevenoh
>I basically got stoned and played video games for the next 5 months.

Did you find this 5 month period notably changed your life
philosophy/trajectory?

~~~
palad1n
Well, actually I stopped smoking pot after this, so in that sense at least the
answer would be yes.

------
Clubber
IIRC, It was the perfect storm. Y2K bug projects were complete, Microsoft had
been found guilty of monopolistic practices, the euro conversion projects were
winding down or complete. I think Greenspan was raising the fed rates, and
taxes were due, so people were selling to pay those. Then 9/11 happened and
that was the final nail in the coffin.

This was the first, "learn to code," era that I recall, so there were a lot of
not-necessarily computer savvy people in the industry, and they were getting
hired. Once things started to slide, companies just stopped hiring as a sort-
term strategy, many held layoffs too. Many people were pushed out of the
industry for good. I was stuck as a contractor and in-between contracts out of
blind luck. I was 4-5 years into a promising career and I couldn't find work
for 6 months. I felt absolutely worthless.

Fortunately I knew a guy who was a partner at my previous contracting firm. He
just pulled a CIO position in a city 2 hours away and they needed someone to
take over their engine (software shop). I had to pick-up and move, but I got a
job that paid a lot less than my previous ones.

I survived, partly because I worked hard, like I was scared to lose my job. I
still work that way. People take notice and will call you when they switch
companies and need to fill a position. Because of this, I haven't had to do a
formal / cold interview since the dot bomb.

~~~
kls
Another item of note was the acceleration of hardware design and manufacturing
moving to China. While it did not directly affect the .com boom, a lot of
those individuals that where left in hardware saw their jobs dry up due to all
the web companies going bust thus killing a portion of hardware demand and
their prospects for their jobs coming back where pretty much nill as when they
market recovered that hiring happened in China.

------
Dowwie
I experienced the fallout of the dot com bubble burst, graduating from
University in 2003 and interning in college.

I was a front office developer analyst at leading buy-side finance company.
One memory that really stuck was elsewhere in tech, if you were in an
infrastructure related role, full time employees were receiving letters
saying:

"The company is downsizing. Your position is one that is scheduled for
strategic reassignment to an offshore consultancy (TCS). Following this
transition, your position in the company will no longer be required. If you
stay with the firm and help train your replacement, you will receive X months
severance. Thank you for your cooperation."

The other tech teams had to work with offshore consultants while doing work
that managers hadn't figured out how to outsource. IT management essentially
had a mandate to outsource anything possible and lower costs. Creating value
for business was secondary. Managerialism sucked all of the life out tech.
Being a programmer wasn't enough. You had to solve business problems.

This turned out to be very useful advice. I saw all around me the consequences
of not doing so. So, I learned programming during the day (mostly sql,
relational db modeling, scripting and reporting) and unfamiliar finance and
business concepts on my own during nights and weekends. This helped me advance
myself into greater challenges and varied terrain.

I'm no longer in finance but got a lot out of the experience. I did the best I
could with the resources available and without compromising my integrity just
to survive at someone else's peril. I learned that managerialism can bring new
product development and growth to a complete halt. Technology solutionism over
promises and under delivers. Business cycles and availability of credit
determine who gets their moment of power and influence. No role is guaranteed.

Keep hustling, people. Complacency and convenience may alleviate stress, but
if you are not growing personally or professionally, you may struggle worse
during hard times. Never stop developing yourself.

------
sokoloff
For me, the most crazy change was several stories in the early 2000s of
running into (literally) used car salespeople who mentioned they were software
devs for a while in 1999. They were hustling cars in 1997, hustling code in
‘98 and ‘99, and back to cars in 2001.

I spent the crash in the financial industry which was hit in its own way: one
fire-sold company office, one closed satellite office with a job transfer to a
consulting company maintaining the same codebase for the company who closed
the sat office. That last was my worst job ever but paid rent. The day the
final retention bonus/bribe to take the consulting gig hit my bank, 6 of us
resigned to come over to our next early-mid-stage startup. My ex-colleagues
from the original office seemed to have slower job searches but all found
interesting and fruitful work. (The office was a D. E. Shaw & Co. office:
fully staffed with higher than average caliber devs. All found work reasonably
quickly.)

In the 2008 GFC, that was much less a tech bubble and more a general financial
issue. Our company just grew more slowly as the world worked itself out of
that crisis, so I have no meaningful insight about that one.

To the extent that this “bubble” feels much less severe than 1999, I suspect
more than 3/4 of qualified devs will do just fine in any tech bubble burst.
Terrible devs barely hanging onto their job now could easily be shaken out
into another field. That might even be better for them overall.

~~~
bdcravens
> They were hustling cars in 1997, hustling code in ‘98 and ‘99, and back to
> cars in 2001.

Hasn't changed that much, except now there's the in-between step of getting
hustled by a boot-camp promising big $.

~~~
throwaway87378
There were Visual Basic boot-camps during the dot-com boom.

------
octorian
I was in the middle of college when that bubble burst, and I kinda felt like I
was being cheated out of the opportunities I was expecting to have when I went
in. Most of this centered around the internship/early-career period that is
quite vital to one's career growth later on.

When I went into college, they talked about all these great internship/co-op
opportunities that everyone got. So each year I went to the career fairs
seeking them out:

\- Freshman year: Go away, we only want juniors

\- Sophomore year: Go away, we only want juniors (though I got lucky and had a
single hit that I did take up on)

\- Junior year: Go away, the tech economy crashed. We only showed up because
we didn't want people to forget we exist.

After college, I attempted some semblance of a grad school experience to bide
my time, while looking for work on top of it. Unfortunately, I often felt like
I was competing with all those people with the critical "4-5 years of
experience" who were unemployed. Furthermore, everything I did find seemed to
be crappy contract positions requiring tons of experience for very little pay.

Eventually I got a gov't job that needed my degree, but didn't use or develop
my skills. I got quite depressed, as I felt like all my education and personal
development was going to waste and was going to rapidly become worthless. When
I finally escaped, it was to a worthless job at a different employer that
actually had future grown opportunities. This ultimately allowed me to pivot
into the kind of job I actually wanted, and the rest is history.

Of course the takeaway from this is that I was already 4-5 years post-
graduation before I had the opportunity to take my career in the direction I
was expecting to go immediately after leaving school.

------
mmaunder
I worked for etoys.com in London and Santa Monica. Was worth $6bn at peak
market cap and got delisted after dropping from $80 a share to below a buck. I
survived multiple layoffs. Ran their warehouse management software for Europe.
Lots of people got screwed. Big tax bills after exercising options and not
selling and watching it drop. Family investing and losing everything. The perl
community was fairly invested in etoys because we were a big Perl Apache and
MySQL shop. Met my wife there. Was fun during the good times but layoffs suck
and so does having the job market shrink. Taught my wife and I what not to do
and how to run a lean but growing biz. Today we run a self funding company of
40 people in the cybersecurity space. So it all worked out just fine.

------
bsaul
I was doing an internship in 2001 during my master and at the time many people
wondered if one shouldn't quit univeristy to start a high paying job (people
would hire you no matter what).

Fast forward 1 year later, i started a PhD in a research lab working on sound
hardware / software in the SV. The day i arrived i noticed something weird :
the first floor of the pretty big building was completely empty. There were
still computers and mugs on some desks, but other than that it looked like a
weird epidemic killed everyone.

I learned later that half of the employees of the research center (including
the local boss) had been fired two weeks before i arrived, and everybody had
been moved to the second floor. I couldn't complete my PhD because they
wouldn't finance new research anymore, so i went back to France and look for a
job. After a few months trying to look for work in the audio field in vain, i
finally ended up finding a job at a consulting firm, doing mundane backoffice
development (database, web-based interface, in corporate environment).

So, basically it went from "we'll hire just anybody, even unqualified", to
"PhD looking for a job" in just a year.

------
Baeocystin
I spent two years welding ships together at the shipyards in San Diego. Yay
fallback skills!

There are times when I miss it. Of all the jobs I've had over the years, it
was the most meritocratic. If you did your job well and didn't cause too much
rework, they loved you. I don't miss the hazardous/chemically toxic work
environment, though. Those two years felt like a decade of wear on my body.

~~~
anonymou2
didn't you wear any protection?

~~~
Baeocystin
Of course. You still spent several hours on site getting to the work area,
breaking to eat lunch, etc. I had it a lot better than the guys that didn't
feel like wearing the respirators, but PPE isn't perfect.

Think of it like wearing shoes at the beach. Yeah, they protect you from most
of the sand as you're walking around, but enough gets past that you still have
to dump them out when you leave.

------
DoubleGlazing
I worked for a tech support and CS outsourcing company. I was developing the
tools they would use for call logging and associated things.

They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com
startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by
having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing
requirements of the clients.

Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support
people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot
com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies
like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became
something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised
canteen.

One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store.
We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the
requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a
full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought
this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They
were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to
change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training
was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they
would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support
company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT
training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.

One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx
xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm
recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically
to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about
an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army
friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall
Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev,
what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer
the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system
bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.

I left soon after that.

------
_greim_
I entered the industry in 2000, and it was "programming geeks"—people who dug
computers and thought coding was fun—who survived the dot com bust mostly
unscathed. Dabblers, fillers, talkers, people-managers, org-climbers, etc. had
some pretty lean years.

That isn't to say some programming geeks didn't get sacked, but they tended to
land on their feet. Also, it was often the hard-negotiating salary-seekers who
found themselves in the cross-hairs, and possibly facing a slight decrease in
standard of living, because of the big price tags they'd put on themselves.

------
username223
I was a young-ish dev at a smallish (200 or so people) company in the Bay Area
during the dot-com crash. I came in one day to find that something like 1/3 of
the people in the company, seemingly chosen at random, no longer worked there.
Those of us who remained were consolidated into one floor instead of the two
we had before. My salary and options were not affected, and the (basic by
modern standards) free food stayed pretty much the same, though I think WebVan
was no longer around to deliver it. I left soon after that, and the company
lived on in cockroach mode for years. I think it was eventually acquired, but
I haven't paid much attention.

One reason my experience wasn't catastrophic was that I was at an
infrastructure company, not a hype-driven one like Pets.com. If/when the
current ad bubble bursts, average devs will fare best working at companies
several steps removed from the hype. People may not want micro-targeted ads,
but they'll still need software.

------
snowwrestler
I got hired as employee #12 in a dotcom in March 2000; by December I was out
of a job. In between, the company raised and mostly spent about $35 million.
The biggest single expenditure was a huge deal to own a topic channel on
AltaVista, which was one of the big portal sites of the day. Everyone was
building portals because search engines were dead ends that were hard to
monetize (seriously, this is what people thought). Yahoo was the 800 lb
gorilla of websites that everyone tried to emulate.

I knew a bit of coding and was scheduled for the Arsdigita boot camp [1] that
would learn me up to be a real programmer. Instead I got laid off with 3
months severance. They had the decency to do it on December 2 so I had health
care through Christmas.

I got a job with a local tech consultant about 3 months later, which paid the
same as the dotcom job. I kept my dotcom stock option paperwork for a little
while for nostalgia's sake... {sigh} I thought I was on my way to being rich
the day I got those papers...

[1] [https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-
camp](https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-camp)

(This will give you an idea of what a web programmer was expected to be able
to do back then. Today what would you call someone who can install Unix on
hardware, install and configure Oracle, install and configure a CMS, and code
up an entire web site?)

~~~
Accujack
I'd call them an "intern" or "entry level".

------
williamDafoe
In November 2000 my options were worth $2.4m on paper but they did not start
vesting until January. In January they were worth -$1.5m and never exceeded
the strike price again, at a company that is still public and worth > 10
billion today. They laid me off in february. I got healthy in 2 months and
found a small startup with a 15% paycut but the CEO was a WeWork-level crook
with a jet and he absconded with all the money 8 months later and it failed. I
finally got a stable job in mid 2002.

~~~
wishinghand
I don’t know how stock options work. If you’re laid off do you no longer have
access to them?

~~~
toast0
To qualify as IRS Incentive Stock Options (ISOs), they have to expire shortly
after you're no longer an employee; some companies these days offer options
than will instead become non-qualified and have a much later expiration, but
that wasn't common in the dot-com boom.

For companies that expect to survive for years after the layoff, they may give
you X months on payroll, and then Y months severance. Your options expiration
because of no longer being an employee would generally start after the X; but
I think most of the layoffs then were immediate --- the companies needed you
off payroll ASAP, so they could stop paying healthcare and what not.

------
barclay
It was late '99 or early '00 when I went to work at my first "tech" startup.
We'd raised 70-something million, and all the stars were aligning. We'd go to
lunch and bring a calculator so we could work through "worst-case scenarios"
millions of dollars were in our future. I remember passing up other job offers
that also included a lease of a new BMW as part of the signing.

Of course, with the down-turn, and given that we were effectively trying to
position ourselves as CRM middleware, all bets were off. The business dried
up, and our burn-rate was through the roof. Word got out the day before about
the upcoming layoffs. The next day there were kegs of beer that sat out in the
engineering pits.

IT had a helluva time, as a lot of people walked off with their laptops and
company-issued phones. The dirty secret was that there was also a complete
(still shrink-wrapped) palette of brand new 2U Dell servers in the loading bay
that mysteriously went missing in the CO office that day.

Like a naive babe in the woods, I survived the first 2? maybe 3? RIFs. Even as
I was building a website that listed all of our hardware and furniture for
sale, and unracking and packing all the servers from the colo—I still didn't
get it. Reality hit like a brick.

I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of folks who continued to
follow each other to other companies either as employees or as contract work
for the next few years. There were maybe one or two scary months, but overall
it was manageable. (Also lesson learned: your network is THE MOST IMPORTANT
THING)

------
dpcan
I stupidly left college to join a dot com for all kinds of fun things like a
huge salary, bonuses, dual monitors, my own office space, a big cool office
building.

Then, after about 6 months, the company funding our company just pulled out.
Left us with a few bucks in the bank.

I took another dot com job about 400 miles away and got out of there. Lots of
people there had no jobs after that, but a few of the smarter crew went on to
huge companies like Microsoft.

The next dot com I went to, I was there through 9/11\. Something inside me
changed after that and I actually quit to pursue a different type of work.
That dot com also went bust, but it never had any hope anyway. The owner was
self-funding it with money he made from investing in dot coms - but he cashed
out at the right time, and he was basically making a clone of another service.
It was pretty terrible.

It was certainly a strange time.

The funny thing is, I just got hired as a contractor to work for another dot
com that reminds be of those ridiculous days. At least all my eggs aren't in
that basket. I hope the best for them, but the similarities are scary.

~~~
heroHACK17
Could you elaborate on the similarities?

------
IdontRememberIt
In Switzerland, the worst event was not this one but 9/11 in 2001.

In a matter of a few hours all new IT/IS project were cancelled and budgets
for IT/IS were frozen to below the minimum in all companies. It took almost a
year to recover a little.

I started my career during the summer 2001. I was hired in seconds without any
technical test.

 _All_ (no exception) my friends who wanted to chill during the summer before
finding their first job... ended jobless for 1 full year.

~~~
mindentropy
Why were jobs in Switzerland affected?

~~~
IdontRememberIt
I do not have the numbers from 2001, but even today USA is our 2nd partner:
[https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/industry-
ser...](https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/industry-
services/foreign-trade/balance-import-export.html)

------
anadem
I had just gotten hired as employee #9 by a startup which was growing fast
making software network components, and after me three more devs were hired in
the next month.

Next month we moved into a much bigger office, with a lovely view and lots of
space for growth - then boom, the crash (gradually) struck: the three people
who'd come in after me were let go, one at a time, and the rest of us were
asked to work part time - volunteering how much part of the time was. We split
the office and squashed into a small part.

I worked one day on / one day off for a couple of years (maybe a bit less)
while our boss scrambled for sales. He was a great guy, was very open and
helpful to us all, and did eventually get the company back on its feet and
eventually sold it. The five founders did well, the boss retired three years
later, and even I did OK (worked for the company that bought us for eight more
years, then also retired.)

------
pjmorris
I was living in Florida, working for a Boston-based WebDev/ISP consultancy.
Smart people, high-flying projects, free snacks, nerf shenanigans, constant
hiring, with bonuses for you-name-it. I'd recently gotten a nice bonus for
bringing on my good friend as the office's systems administrator.

Business slowed, clients missed payments, people started watching f*d.com, the
first round of layoffs came, the execs did a tour and promised all was ok, the
second round of layoffs came. We spend a lot of time at Starbucks
contemplating plan B.

One day I came in and the laptop wouldn't connect to the network. I stick my
head in my friend's office, and say "My laptop won't connect, is there
something I should know?" He gets that deer in the headlights look, rushes off
to check with the management, and a meeting is convened where the third layoff
happens, something I'm part of and he's not (Probable cause for me being out:
I didn't play ball on a traveling assignment I didn't want, was OK with the
outcome. My friend hung on to the bitter end, and we laugh about it now.) The
hardest day was sending back the extra paycheck the company had accidentally
sent.

I started looking for jobs, but I started getting calls from friends who heard
I was available for a week here, a month there, a six-month thing, etc, etc. I
wound up forming an LLC and staying self-employed until decided I needed a
nice safe job just before the financial crisis.

~~~
elevenoh
>people started watching f _d.com

what is f_d.com?

~~~
williamDafoe
It was a chat forum website called fuckedcompany.com. today a similar website
is thelayoff.com. there is one subforum per company and everybody spreads
rumors about how near is the end at xyz.com and why ...

------
fauigerzigerk
What I can tell you with some confidence is that something like the dot com
bust can never happen again in our industry.

The strange thing was how suddenly it happened. It felt like the majority of
projects got defunded in a matter of weeks or months. Our funding disappeared
as the VC firm collapsed together with its parent company. Our customers
(telcos) stopped approving any new projects that weren't guaranteed to be
profitable within the quarter as they were hit by a ruinous bidding war for
frequency sprectrum at the same time.

The reason why I'm saying it can never happen again (in this particular
industry) is that tech/internet was a tiny and isolated part of the economy
back then (called "The New Economy"). Today's tech industry is huge and very
diverse. It's part of everything now. The largest corporations on earth are
now tech firms. Back then, there was nowhere to go for many employees in that
sector (at least for a while).

I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money, partly because I had
refused to take stock options in place of proper payment. So I was able to
self-fund some projects that I was interested in with a goal of creating an
organically growing company. I've been avoiding the whole high growth VC
culture ever since, which may have been a mistake in purely financial terms.

------
bdcravens
You need to frame it in terms of the times. The web was relatively new, and
there was a dramatic shortage of talent. Remote work was pretty rare, and the
infrastructure to support it was very nascent.

Web development wasn't very mature: just knowing HTML could net you a nice
paycheck. You could go even farther with basic spaghetti-code skills in
languages like PHP, ColdFusion, and ASP. Frameworks really weren't a thing.
Javascript wasn't used for much more than form validation, so you could go to
your favorite "DHTML" website and find scripts to copy.

Couple this with the high pay, and there were a TON of "developers" who were
one- or two-trick ponies. Someone who honestly was better suited for sales or
management were writing code and making big bucks, and assumed this was their
life path. For many, they turned into developers. Many didn't, and left.

In my experience, if you knew more than one backend language, and were happy
working in boring fields (often in boring locations) like travel or healthcare
or energy, you probably didn't go without work for long. (I was at Sabre at
the time, working in their HR department, and 9/11 affected me more than the
dot-com bubble)

------
misja
I was employee #4 in a startup in 2000, just before the burst. At that time
the situation was crazy. For instance our founders had made an ambitious
business plan to raise money in the next investment round. It was sent back by
our investors because it was not ambitious enough: basically they asked to
blindly multiply all the targets by 10. This was completely unrealistic but
the founders did what they were asked and promptly new investment money came
rushing in.

And then the bubble burst and the sentiment was 180 degrees opposite. By then
our company had already acquired some customers and was making some money, and
was ready to expand and grab a significant piece of the market. However it
didn't matter what we did or what business plan we made, it was just
impossible to raise any kind of money whatsoever. So our startup continued
living its zombie life until it was taken over by a competitor a few years
later. In the end I was lucky because this way I could survive the years after
a crash while still having a job. But it left me with mixed feelings about the
so called angel investors. It didn't appear to me that they had any idea what
they were doing.

------
JohnBooty
I was on the East Coast, 2500 miles away from Silicon Valley. But we felt it
out here too.

It was hard to know if you (as an internet application developer) would ever
make a nice salary againn.

I don't think anybody thought that skilled and experienced internet
application developers were going to be out of work _forever._

It seemed clear that the internet had definitely solidified itself as a part
of everyday life. There was going to be an internet, and things to do and buy
on there, and people were going to have to build those things.

I think my main concern was how lucrative it was going to be. I briefly made
$100K in my early 20s in the early 2000s with just a few years experience.
Even at the time that didn't really seem sustainable.

When the crash hit, I soon went back to making $40 or $50K. That was nice
enough money but I didn't know how far things were going to fall. Would the
market be flooded with programmers? Would I eventually be making $25K as an
experienced developer? Would I make $100K again someday?

So I worried a little bit... not too much.

There were still jobs and they were OK enough.

------
cameroncf
I wasn't in the valley at the time but was part of a startup that lost our
angel funding before it happened because the angel's funds were overcommitted
already in failing startups.

My view has always been that during the dot com boom, companies were so short
staffed that they would basically take anyone on, regardless of their
technical skill, with the hopes of training them up to learn programming.
Janitor, receptionist, your weird cousin Eddie who ate glue - all of them
could get a tech job if they really wanted one.

When the bubble burst, lots of people lost jobs. Both skilled people and
unskilled. This was a huge darwin moment for people who'd worked at startups.
Lots of people went back to whatever they were doing pre-bubble. The better
people typically found work, even if it took a little while to do so.

In my view, it really did serve as a healthy shake-out of talent in the long
run. This very well may happen again soon...

------
blakesterz
I was a lucky one I guess. One day we came into work and there was guards at
the the door checking IDs. About 1/2 the place got let go that day. We went
from having dreams of being millionaires to just being happy we had jobs. I
bailed out at some point, but the place is still going, some of the same
people are even still there! It was scary as hell to see this place go from 80
people to 100 something and back to 80 in just a year or two.

------
intellectronica
One day it was all froth and then all of a sudden there was no work. I was
lucky enough to have had enough money in the back to be able to spend the
following two years studying, travelling and working on open-source software,
and actually had a really good time that I look back on fondly, but I knew
many people who had to switch from a very lucrative job at a startup to
waiting tables and such.

Lesson: if you're making good money now, save (and if you then find yourself
with nothing to do which pays, try to make the best of that time by doing
interesting things that you would normally not have the time to do).

------
edw519
I've lived through the dot-com burst, 4 recessions, 3 stock implosions, 3
personal tragedies, and more mergers and acquisitions than I can remember. I
have written millions of lines of code and have never missed a day of work.

It has had nothing to do with choice of technology, industry, physical
location, contacts, or luck (I think).

The only common denominator I can cite is finding out what people (customers
or employers) really need, figuring out how to build it for them, consistently
building it, and staying friendly and helpful throughout.

Do that and nothing else matters. Don't do that and keep worrying about it.
It's that simple.

------
grepthisab
This thread is scaring me.

Question on exercising and such. I have all exercised options, but not all
vested, been here about 2 years, so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise
because there was no difference between exercise price and market price.

What happens taxwise if my company goes under? Don't I only owe taxes if I
sell vested options?

~~~
pm24601
> I have all exercised options, but not all vested, been here about 2 years,
> so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise because there was no difference
> between exercise price and market price.

Early exercise with a 83b election?

You will be fine.

The tax problem happens like this:

1\. Your option strike price is $0.01/sh

2\. The current price as set by the board (or the stock market if public) is
$10/sh

3\. You exercise 2000000 shares

4\. You write a check to your company 2000000 sh * $0.01/sh = $20000

The fair market value (as determined in step #2) is 2,000,000 sh * $10/sh =
$20,000,000

The IRS says "wait a minute you only paid $20,000 for something that is worth
$20,000,000".

The difference $20,000,000 - $20,000 = $19,980,000 was a 'gift' that requires
taxes to be paid.

Now lets do the 83b election with early exercise. In that case the FMV == the
strike price on the options. The difference is $0 You are paying FMV and there
is no 'gift'.

~~~
grepthisab
Thank you! The 83b situation is the one I'm in. Appreciate it, sorry for the
late response.

------
goatinaboat
I was laid off in 2001. In the second of 4 waves. Prior to the first wave one
of the co-founders flew over on Concorde to tell us that each of us could save
$5/day there would be no layoffs!

I got a reasonable package, 3 months salary, and 2 weeks later joined a new
startup (which a few years later was acquired). I actually saw an increase in
salary. Those two factors compensated somewhat for the layoff trauma.

People who had solid skills like C++ were fine, generally. It was those with
only HTML who had made good money in the 90s and never upgraded to real
programming that suffered the most.

------
myth_drannon
2002 - I was about to start university studying comp-sci, meanwhile, I was
working as a security guard in Toronto at HQ of one of the largest banks in
Canada. The majority of guards were laid off software developers that couldn't
find a developer position. Some were actively trying to move to trades.

------
LeonB
Was sent out to visit a customer- a .com startup.

The week before it had been a buzzing vibrant exciting place. They were using
something “new” called XP, extreme programming where you put two programmers
side by side for an hour or two and then keep switching the combinations
throughout the day.

There were unlimited free snacks and a free wheeling fun atmosphere. A really
exciting place.

That day when i turned up, the doors were locked and the building was empty.

I rang up my boss to say the client was shut today. We found out after that
their funding had been withdrawn and they’d shut without notice.

------
acdha
Echoing a bunch of common responses: a lot of the crash and burns were reality
catching up with wild expectations — we had business with pets.com and there
were times where they had a room full of “technical” staff who had no idea how
the web worked but were more or less openly counting down the days until they
became rich. If you’re working somewhere where there isn’t a realistic plan
for the numbers to work, that’s a good cue to reconsider your risk exposure.

That didn’t mean that people who were good didn’t also get hit, so there are
two other points I’d consider: lots of the dotcom bubble workers spent money
as quickly as they made it, often locking in fixed commitments like car
payments or mortgages so they had only a short period of solvency if their
income changed dramatically. Having reserves is a great peace of mind measure,
as is knowing which expenses you could cut quickly if needed – especially if,
say, you went from $$$ at a cool sexy company to $$ at a boring but stable
job.

The other thing is considering correlated failures: if everyone around you
works in the same industry, you’re going to be competing with them for jobs
and unable to sell a house at a good price if the market sours broadly. That
doesn't mean you should flee SV but you would want to be prepared to stay put
for awhile with large reserves. Similarly, focusing your investments in the
same field can end badly — here I’m thinking of a trend-following sales guy
who got laid off and had to explain to his wife that he’d also put most of
their savings into dotcom stocks which all tanked at the same time.

------
cityzen
Life is what you make it. I chose to remain independent for my career. Both
2000 and 2007 came and went and unless someone told me, I wouldn't know we
were in a recession or stock market crash.

Perhaps I missed out on a few opportunities but I never really wanted to trade
my freedom for the _chance_ of money.

If you have a good network and do quality work, you will be in demand
regardless of the market. There will never be a shortage of people that need
good, quality work done and are willing to pay for it.

~~~
SPascareli13
How to you make a transition to this way of working? Is it all about
networking?

------
swagtricker
Here's ALL you need to know about your company stock options: ask yourself -
if I had ($PRICE_PER_SHARE * $NUMBER_OF_SHARES) in cash sitting in my checking
account RIGHT NOW, would I dump ALL of it into my company's stock? If the
answer is yes - hold onto those options and simply DO NOT exercise them. If
the answer is NO - FUCKING SELL THEM NOW! Take the tax hit, diversify into
other investments, take a cruse, waste it on strippers & blow in Las Vegas -
whatever. At NO point hold actual SHARES of your company stock. Options are
compensation lottery tickets. That's exactly how executives view them, that's
exactly how you should view them. Trust the guy who "held on" to about
$100,000.00 USD worth of options as the stock crashed into the ground between
February 2000 and October 2000. I could have paid off $40k worth of my wife's
& my student loans, $20K worth of auto loans and still had money in the bank
after taxes, but I believe the bullshit & hype. I regret it to this day and
I'll probably never get type of stock option shot again.

It's a simple question: if I had the value of my company stock in cold, hard
ca$h today - would I dump it ALL into a brokerage account to buy said company
stock?

~~~
swagtricker
ADDENDUM: This decision is if you're like me & my wife: born into a middle to
lower-middle class family. Have made it to where you are in life via hard work
& dumb luck. Have no "glass floor" below you. Have no family member who could
have even begun to tell you what to do with stock options. If you're "born on
3rd base thinking you've hit a triple" (e.g. mom & dad have money and will
make sure you never end up homeless and sleeping in your car) just ask your
family lawyer and/or CPA. I'm sure they have contacts to help you out.

------
DennisP
As a regular dev on the east coast, working for a company with large corporate
clients in conservative industries, the crash had basically no impact at all.

People looking for new jobs might have had a little more trouble. And the
dotcom boom brought a lot of devs with minimal skills, just because it was
impossible to find good devs; some of those who hadn't leveled up in time for
the crash got shaken out. But anyone who really could write code did fine, in
my town.

~~~
lm28469
> working for a company with large corporate clients in conservative
> industries, the crash had basically no impact at all.

Exactly, if there is a new crash it'll affect BS startups. aka: if your
company is working on a BS service, isn't profitable after X years and is only
able to survive due to investors initial $$$ you're in a bad place, including
companies with a proper product but an oversized engineering team _. If you
're working on a real/profitable product in a healthy company/market you'won't
feel a thing.

_ uber, snapchat, wework &c.

------
NotSammyHagar
I was working at Microsoft at the time. All the smart cool people left to go
do startups, money was easy to get. This was 5 years in to my first job. I
encouraged my friends not to sell their Microsoft stock because it was going
up for a long time still (some are even still my friends). The market crashed
but Microsoft kept on going. I didn't really notice a change. Many of my
friends came back to the mother ship. I recognize I was lucky.

~~~
taude
That's great. I was one who left Redmond, but never made it back. I still have
"some" regrets about leaving, but have gained a lot of great experiences. (I'd
have no doubt been better off financially staying there, though.)

------
gaba7
I had my H1B visa and ready to work in USA. Resigned my job. My US employer
asked me not to board the flight since the job situation was very bad. That
was beginning of 2001. I tried for other jobs and got a UK work permit by mid
2001. But that also went bust very shortly due to UK dot com crash. I must
have been the only person with two countries work permits and without a job.
Local companies refused to hire me once they saw my passport.

~~~
cerberusss
So how did you manage to stay afloat in your home country? Could you live with
your parents or something?

~~~
gaba7
I'm from India. I was living off my savings and my parents.

------
peterwwillis
> what to expect if such a thing were to happen again

Expect to be unemployed. If don't think there will be a stretch of time in
your future where you won't be unemployed for a while, think again. Have a
backup plan. Have savings. Move in with the parents and bus tables, try a
different field you have a little experience in, keep in touch with people.
It's a lot less scary if you're prepared than if you wait and see.

------
lumberingjack
In late 1990s I was still in high school but the.com bubble still reached us
there at a young age. I was put into a tech training course called CIT 1 & CIT
2 it was 4 years of tech and college courses. Everyday for 4 years I had a
computer integrated technology class that taught everything from how to deal
with users all the way to networking & computer programming. We worked on
as400, the school network and teachers computers at 14 years old we were
experimenting with OSPF. This "pioneer program" was scrutinized and hailed as
a victory by news broadcasters & newspapers we were interviewed by all kinds
of people throughout the program looking to do the same in their schools. This
was the fast track once we got out of high school we were college trained and
ready to go into the workforce. The burst happened right after I got out I
actually went from interviewing at Fortune 500 companies to taking a cable
pulling job that was local for minimum wage. I ended up with a construction
company that builds smart homes and I've been happy there ever since.

------
j45
Imagine all the hype. But few average citizens online. Little to no e-commerce
from consumers. No smartphones within mobile data that was fast.

The majority of people around the web were either techies, or speculators who
didn’t understand it and wanted to cash in.

Average devs were largely devs because they grew up with a passion for tech
before it being a profession. The fact that it child be a profession was a
bonus. Today some would say you find more devs who choose it as a profession
first but not a childhood passion.

When the crash happened there were fewer tech jobs. For the speculation and
hype based businesses. I switched to tech in the b2b space because it paid..
with a goal of to become as recession proof and crash proof with my skills
because I believed in what software could accomplish that much.

After that there was Napster.. Friendster.. hi5 that built up to the next
internet generation.. Around 2005 Facebook became the first thing that average
people did online, followed by 2009 and the iPad arriving where there was a
shift from people becoming primarily consumers instead of creators with tech.

------
newnewpdro
I'm seeing a surprising number of comments describing catastrophic tax
outcomes due to exercising options with a large spread and holding the stock
long enough for it to tank before selling, while still being stuck with a
massive tax bill.

This situation is easily avoided by filing your 83b and early exercising your
options immediately, or at least before a subsequent funding round/term sheet
valuation cycle.

None of the comments describing those outcomes mention this. For those reading
and new to the startup game, read up on the 83b. When you're an early employee
at a startup, the cost of early-exercising even a substantial number of shares
is often not cost-prohibitive. And should you leave the company before it all
vests, you get a check for the unvested remains. It's a _NO-BRAINER_ when the
exercise cost is small.

[https://blog.wealthfront.com/always-file-
your-83b/](https://blog.wealthfront.com/always-file-your-83b/)

------
RickJWagner
I guess I was an 'average dev' at that time. I was developing applications for
a company that sold software to banks. Around 2000 I was into client/server
computing, working with VB, C++ and Tuxedo for a transaction monitor.

I never really felt the bubble burst. Maybe raises were slower for a while,
but I don't remember it. Mostly a non-event.

------
USNetizen
The current environment is nothing like the dot-com boom. The dot-com
boom/bust was driven by public markets, whereas now the public markets are the
ones who are filtering out the wild valuations now before it gets out of hand
and throws the country into a recession like it did last time.

~~~
ghaff
I suspect that a lot of people here would be surprised at how many people have
never even heard of a lot of the tech (or "tech") companies that are so
prominent in industry's awareness.

One example. I saw a stat a month or so ago that something like 63% of
Americans had never taken an Uber. I'm sure the vast majority have never heard
of WeWork.

Yes, some of these companies are now public. But this isn't a matter of a
whole industry having a major downturn. It's mostly companies that are well-
known in some circles but are pretty inconsequential in the scheme of things.

------
joshmarinacci
It felt bad because our dot com hopes were dashed, but life for a regular
programmer wasn't too bad. I was about 4 years out of college then and it just
meant I had to take boring jobs at big companies like Home Depot writing
database front ends. I was still able to pay the bills though.

------
jacobush
A week after college (or uni, Sweden is a little weird), I didn't know what to
do, but I got scooped up by the local combined "hey we make websites, run
courses in Internet-y things and programming, and we are also the largest
local Internet Service Provider". I worked there for a while for a _way_ too
low salary (but I thought I had struck gold) for a couple of years, then
switched employer to one of the companies I was consulting for. I was sent
overseas to attend a one week cours in "Vision 4GL", which was the language we
were using at the time. Everything was very expensive, yet money flowed. They
also had to pay a hefty penalty to my original employer so they could hire me.
There I was doing logistics software for an airport. Each package back then
had in total, 17 paper copies being pushed around. Then the twin towers were
hit. We had a "live feed" of logistics messages. (IATA and EDIFACT messages.)
Suddenly, a lot of "cancel" messages started dropping in. Planes bound for the
US were turning around.

We didn't have a TV at the cramped, jet exhaust stinking office at the
airport. We listened to the radio but there was almost nothing of substance.
We turned to news on web sites, most papers had a web presence, but it was
only one in Sweden which held up to the pressure of so many suddenly looking
for information. They did it but cutting out images and serving only text
content on their front page.

A couple of months later (IIRC) I was laid off. It was hard finding a job.
Since I was this hotshot newly hatched programmer on the market, I hadn't
bothered paying "unemployment insurance" and I didn't have any savings either.
All the big companies like Ericsson were in starve mode, and the ecosystem of
consulting companies around the big industry were dying or laying off or both.
I started a ltd liability company and found a gig through that for a year or
so. I had to cut rates something fierce and move to another city but it was a
living. A year later or so I found a "real" job and promptly decided running
my own business was not for me. Been on the salary treadmill ever since. (But
at various smaller and larger companies.)

Edit: insert all sorts of personal life shenanigans affected by all this, too.

------
jedberg
We knew it was the beginning of the end when the price on the snack vending
machine went from 10 cents to 25 cents.

------
vladus2000
I wasn't out of college long, but I managed to survive two layoffs where I
worked. We had almost no turnover in developers for a year or two because
basically no one was hiring, normal for that job at that time was probably
around 20% per year if not higher. There were no jobs to have, some of the
people that were laid off didn't get jobs for upwards of a year, and some of
those I know that did, ended up moving to get a job (I am not in one of the
top 3 cities for it). They also really didn't give raises or promotions during
that time either.

When I was in school, the comp sci program was so full it was hard to get into
classes, hard to find a computer free in a lab to do the assignments/projects.
The same college a few years later didn't have that problem from people I
talked to. I never looked up the numbers, but I would imagine the number of
people going into it dropped quite a bit, at least if the anecdotal stories I
heard are to be believed.

Where I worked had nothing to do with experimental tech or anything, we lived
on selling somewhat specialized, expensive software and hardware. The problem
was, no one wanted to spend money.

It was somewhat demoralizing, as the second round of layoffs really hurt and
it wasn't a fun job anymore, but I couldn't do anything about that for awhile.

I also know people who invested poorly that had all of their savings
evaporated. Some people were paid partially in stock that pretty much went to
0 very quickly. It wasn't the best time.

------
bg4
I was in CS seeing friends gets 10-12 job offers in the late 90s. Graduated in
May of '02 and it took me a year to find an entry level software job and the
pay was shit.

------
trashface
I was working at a startup that had SF and Mountain View offices at the time
of 9/11\. SF offices for tech companies were somewhat unusual then, though a
lot were under construction. Most companies still had their main HQ somewhere
on the peninsula. Although the tech decline had started before 9/11, it really
seemed to pick up speed after that. I remember one of the company execs
talking about the next round of funding and basically saying investors were
"holed up in their bunkers" \- that is, not funding anything. I did know
(talented!) programmers that lost their jobs - one even collected unemployment
for a time. In early 2002, the company I was at closed the SF office, and then
I was also unemployed.

After a few months, I found a replacement job at a non-startup in South San
Francisco. The pay was OK but work was a bit dull. After a couple of years I
moved out and haven't been been back except to visit. Spent a total of 6 years
living in SF and working around the area, from 1998 to 2004. While there, I
saved very little money and also never made anything from stock options. When
I left I had about about 30K in my 401K account and 20K in savings. Hopefully
startup compensation is better today. I know the rents are still insane.

I'd say from a programmer perspective the 2000 bubble bursting was bad but not
catastrophic. If we are now in a new bubble, I hope it won't be too bad if it
bursts. But the industry employs way more people now and is much more
fundamental to the overall economy. So there is cause for concern...if
suddenly 10s of thousands of programmers are out looking for work, that ain't
gonna be pretty.

------
cr0sh
I basically missed the whole thing.

Partially because of my location (Phoenix isn't exactly a hub of tech startups
- while there is more activity now somewhat, back then it was much different),
and partially because I stuck with my employer at the time and didn't
participate outside of that.

I was working for a long established software company that developed an
insurance claims management system using a variant of COBOL. I didn't
participate in that side of things, though - I was involved on a different
team for development of an internally used application which was written in
VB6 with an Access DB backend MDB file (ugh).

I basically worked there for about 6 years doing that, and completely missed
the whole "dot-com" thing. Might have been a bad career decision, but then
again, maybe staying in Phoenix was also one. But the pay has been steady, it
has kept a roof over my head and the electricity on.

Since then, I have moved on to other jobs and continued with my career. I
haven't become rich, and at my age I don't expect to ever hit a unicorn and be
on the bottom floor of a startup and retire early. I am expecting to work
until I die, whatever form "work" takes. Currently, it is still coding as an
SWE and hopefully that will remain the way it is for a while.

------
ryan-allen
I was affected by the bubble in a positive way.

I'm mid 30s, I got my first job in a junior role in 2001 doing web graphics
(before I became a proper programmer).

I was hired because our CEO knew he couldn't hire people who had it good in
the boom because they expected too much money.

So they specifically looked for people who had skills but limited or no job
history, and paid them close to minimum wage.

It worked out well for me in the end as it was a foot in the door when loads
of people were looking for work.

------
sebbo
It was wild.

Around 1999, I interviewed for my first proper tech job. I had no commercial
experience. For the interview I had to drink vodka with the guy interviewing
me and shoot some shit. The interview ended when he fell off the chair. I got
the job: decent salary, stock options, really nice office.

Hardly anyone there knew what they were doing. That was good for me because I
got to pick whatever tech I wanted (open source over the in-house Microsoft
stuff). The software and our management processes were a mess. But that didn't
matter, because the company was a dotcom darling. I think we charged one large
client $1m to make an online store. It sold about 10 products, if I remember
correctly. Most of our websites didn't really work very well, though they
tended to look pretty nice.

There was plenty of daytime drinking, and drugs and parties. Not long before
the crash, several thousand employees were flown to Vegas from all over the
world. Lots of partying, cocktails in the pool, mixed in with some bizarre
team-building workshops. For the finale, a specially-built circular auditorium
with techno music pumping and spotlights whirling, into which the CEO himself
drove on an electric scooter to the wild cheers of the crowd, pumping his fist
and going round and round in circles.

I found it utterly demotivating to be involved in doing such a bad job of
making such overpriced websites, all to the sound track of masturbatory,
content-free self-promotion. I left shortly afterwards. It is interesting to
me that a number of alumni have gone on to successfully make their millions in
their own startups.

P.S. Before my stock options vested they were worth well over $100k. By the
time they vested I got $7k.

------
tbyehl
As a mid-20s Windows sysadmin focussed on automation for web hosting, getting
laid off in '01 really kicked my ass.

Want someone who knows how to reliably and "securely" (by 2001 standards) host
hundreds of ASP sites on Windows 2000? Only a few people know how to do that
and I was part of the team who figured it out first. Want to turn a hundred
freshly racked servers into Windows hosts in a couple hours? I'd just finished
building a system to do that.

Nobody was hiring for those skills. For years. Web hosters were struggling to
stay alive and automation wasn't on their radar. Enterprises were building
servers as pets, not cattle. Virtualization hadn't really arrived yet.

I'd get interviews because my resume was interesting but in a buyer's market
_smart and gets shit done_ is less valuable than particular experience. It was
two years before a local hoster was hiring for technical roles, and took
another two to claw my way back to the type of work I enjoyed.

As the broader IT market started catching up to my specialty, I took a couple
year detour into our IT department so I wouldn't risk being caught out again
without more broadly-applicable experience. Better to be easily employable
than maximize my earnings...

\---

Something I don't see mentioned in the comments here is that the 2000-2001
apocalypse launched the bootstrapped startup economy (and YC). Talented people
couldn't land full-time W2 jobs, so many of them launched startups on a
shoestring financed with their savings or by consulting. They'd gain some
traction and become a "lifestyle business", or more, or be acquired by one of
the big DotCom survivors.

------
daxfohl
I'll offer a story a little different from most here.

I was newly graduated and working at Accenture, erm, Andersen Consulting at
the time. They had an incredible deal in light of the recession, where you
could take up to a year unpaid leave (I can't remember how benefits worked
out, was too young to care) and be guaranteed a job upon your return. I took
the entire year to travel.

There was always the worry that they'd go back on their word, but they didn't,
for me or for anyone else I've heard from. And when I came back I was at my
same client as prior (eBay) and had a few years of low rent and light traffic
in San Jose, after which I bailed for less congested pastures. (Actually I
don't remember rent going down too much. But traffic definitely got lighter.)

I don't know how to arrange things so that it works out that well in your
favor, but maybe try planting some seeds in your manager's head if it looks
like the next downturn might be temporary (they always are). And don't own too
much stuff, so you can take off at will. (I literally packed all my belongings
in the trunk of my Jetta and left it in storage).

~~~
chrshawkes
Sounds like a terrible existence for a family man with kids.

------
codeprimate
I think the only thing that saved my career was dropping out of college 2
years early in 2000. I immediately started working in a print shop doing data
processing work and earning my chops and programming experience through self-
directed automation and process improvements. My friends in retail earned more
than me, but I learned far more in 4 years there than college would have made
possible. Leveraging my Linux and general programming experience I moved on to
web development work in 2004 at a tiny consulting company based in the
upstairs living room of my boss. We did "lean" and "agile" right and survived
through the bust by wearing all of the hats and working hard. We could provide
high quality solutions for half the cost quoted by large competitors. The pay
was simply ok (but my colleagues and employer were amazing). Later, with a
baby on the way I had to move on for better pay. Leaving was hard, but finding
a position wasn't with all the experience I earned at a cut rate.

In short: I grew, barely survived financially, and made excellent connections.

------
jzdziarski
Startups had unbelievable burn rates, sales and marketing teams overpromised
technology, and greedy executives, who should never have been in charge of
money, sought to invest millions in building the appearance of an empire
rather than grow organically. Eyeballs, not earnings, was the focus. Many such
companies would go bankrupt overnight. I was out of a job for six months. It
was the most humbling part of my career. We almost lost everything. For a
short time, we were on food stamps. I knew some scripting languages, Oracle,
and systems engineering at the time and was doing mostly web based
development, DBA, and server infrastructure buildout work - yet we couldn’t
afford to pay for baby formula. During that six months, I taught myself C,
discovered machine learning, and picked up other skills that would later open
doors I never imagined would be possible for me. Hard times brought
perseverance, humility, and an appreciation for the value of a dollar. I
learned some of the most foundation skills and life lessons during the dot
bomb.

------
autarch
Weirdly, it had very little impact on me. I got my first dev job in December
of 1998 and was let go in early 2000. Then I did contract work for O'Reilly
(yes, that O'Reilly). We ported a pretty horrendous forum web app (WebBoard)
written in VB to Perl on Unix. In early 2001, just as we were finishing, they
announced that they were shutting down their software division.

Around early 2001 I started at a new startup in Minneapolis. It lasted less
than a year, but they let us know when they were running out of money a few
months out, which I appreciated. No severance though (they were really _out_
of money, I believe).

I ended up doing contract work for them after I was let go (they stayed alive
for another year or so with just 3 people, down from 12). I also had some
other contract work I found through a friend I'd worked with at my first
position.

Eventually I joined another startup in 2004, which also went nowhere but took
several years to do it. I left before they sold for a pittance because it was
deeply dysfunctional.

I never felt like the crash severely impacted me. I never had any major
downtime and while I didn't do contract work 40 hours a week when I was doing
it, that was as much my disinterest in work as it was the work being
available.

I think I was lucky enough to have the right contacts and a good rep in the
Perl community, which combined to let me find a reasonable amount of work to
last out the crash time.

Also, I was living in Minneapolis the entire time, which was (and is) _way_
cheaper than the bay area or NYC or any other hot tech area. I think my wife
and I paid something like $1,200 a month for half of a large 3 story house
(the entire first floor with 3 rooms + 2 rooms upstairs) back in 2001. I think
in SF that would've gotten us a closet, maybe two.

~~~
Accujack
I was also in Minneapolis.... I didn't work for a dot-com, just the USPS data
center in the area, and then for a medical device company.

About the only effect of the bust I saw was that the job market went south
with all the temporarily embarrassed "software engineers" seeking positions
like mine (I was/am a system admin and developer among many other things).

Kept the job until the market improved somewhat, cashed in my 401k at the time
(dumb) to put a down payment on a house just before the 2008 bust. Then I went
to work for a University for 10 years.

The major impact of the various busts on me has been a lack of mobility (both
career wise and ability to move to a new house). Other than that, not much.

I credit this to my choice of jobs (building a career) and focus in the
industry, plus the fact that I've lived the role since college. I didn't
become an IT guy because it was a way to get and keep good jobs... I was
already one college, and I've been lucky that what I am happens to pay well.

------
AceJohnny2
Cory Doctorow's short story "0wnz0red", about Silicon Valley geekery (not to
spoil anything), was published in 2002.

Apart from some technological touch stones, it's impressive how it still feels
culturally current.

[https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/](https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/)

------
lancebeet
I really recommend the 2000 documentary Code Rush[1] about Netscape's open
sourcing of the browser and acquisition by AOL. It doesn't give any major
insights into the industry, but does give a glimpse of what the culture was
like back then.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y)

------
tomnoddy
We launched right at the beginning of the end, although we didn’t know it at
the time.

Everyone thought they were making tons of money, based on valuations that were
only on paper. Kind of like losing $5B and still thinking it’s a valuable
company.

I first noticed problems when we repeatedly had potential client me be dark
when we showed up for meetings. They were just gone, and no one bothered to
Let you know. They had other things to worry about.

We didn’t get to the point where we could exercise options, but some people
were badly burned at time time. If you exercised a million dollars worth of
options and hold them past the end of they year, you owed taxes. If the shares
were now worth zero, you still owed the taxes. This bit the rank and file, who
thought they were getting rich, and ended up poorer than before. (IIRC you
could carry forward the loss, but that’s no good if that was the only stock
you ever got)

We got bought, and had dead end jobs for a while, before they laid us off. Was
not too hard to find a job again.

I recommend reading about tulip mania. It’s amazing how similar that was.

------
yubiox
I went to law school, which was a huge mistake. It was fun, but working as a
lawyer sucks - depressing situations plus no matter how good a job you do,
some random judge can ruin your client's life. Went back into tech and I do a
tiny bit of law on the side. Still paying for it. Oh and now I make about half
what I was making before the crash and pay much more in taxes.

------
thefourthchime
I was working for a biotech when the hammer fell. Got “laid off” though to be
honest, I slacked and I was certainly at the top of the list of guys to get
rid of.

I spent the next 8 months trying to get a job, I applied to hundreds of jobs,
maybe in that time I had 6 interviews. Mostly smaller shops without much money
or interesting work.

Finally one day I got a phone interview with a company in New York, I was in
Austin at the time. Shockingly they offered me a job after just that phone
call, I think I lucked out with knowing some weird parts of c++.

I told myself i would never get fired or laid off again and worked my ass off.
First in and last to leave, picked up extra projects. I was a rising star,
until that company ran out of money. After surviving 3 rounds of layoffs an
old friend called and asked if I wanted to move back to Austin making 30%
less, I took it as they were at least not actively going out of business.

Since then my career has grown and I’ve been fine, but that long spell without
a job or a future was scary as hell. I hope I never have to go through it
again.

------
JohnFen
From my observations during the time, what your experience as a dev was
depended entirely on what sort of company you were working for. If you were
working for one of the SV hotshots, then the odds were that you had a rough
time of it.

However, most of the devs I knew (including myself) were not, and that set of
devs were no more affected by the bubble burst than society at large was.

------
ada1981
I read this “how was life for a regular div” and I was hoping for a first
person fictional account of an element ahead of its time...

------
vfc1
I was working in Lisbon straight out of college in a consulting company, and
we were 300 people occupying 3 floors in one of the city's major office areas.

Things were already going downhill, but then 9/11 came, we had a building
evacuation etc. and then in the space of 3 months we had downsized to less
than 100 people and a single floor, the other two floors where closed.

A lot of people were sent back to their home offices (Spain, Poland and all
over Europe) and then laid off there, as major support contracts were not
renewed.

The salaries back then and even before in the late '90s were actually about
the same as they are now in 2019. The same goes for the consulting rates, they
have remained largely unchanged in the past 20 years or so.

If you add up 20 years of inflation, you will see that back then being a
software developer was a very interesting option and a job much in demand.

A lot of people went from development into testing, production support, sys
admin, business analysis, etc.

------
stretchwithme
Was lucky at a web-based training company that had enough paying corporate
customers to keep me on until 2005.

So many things got cheaper in the Valley. Whole companies started just to sell
off all the Aeron chairs and other leftovers.

Rent actually went down. Got a place for 40% less than the previous tenant in
2003. I remember our CEO renegotiating every major expense.

------
epx
In bad times, the correlation of bad things rises a lot, just like so many
fund managers have discovered the hard way.

In 2001, seeing what was coming, I left a Linux distro startup and went back
to a previous and seemingly secure IT job. I even had plans to take aircraft
lessons...

Then, the owner sold the company. The buyers were actually "locusts" \- people
that offer to buy struggling businesses just to hollow out the assets and then
hand the company back ("we saw too many problems, so we are no longer
interested").

Back to a market that was fully depressed, had to take a project involving
gambling machines (I think they are called "one-armed bandits" in English). It
was a technically interesting project, but the people involved in this
business are unbearable. After some months into it, I trembled every time the
phone rang. After I finally quit, it took 6 years to fully recover from
anxiety and depression.

~~~
danilocesar
I was wondering: "oh, I know a lot of stories of people working for Linux
distro startups back then"...

then I recognized the nickname :)

------
poulsbohemian
I had a good internship every summer through school and was about a year out
of school working for a multinational media company when the layoffs came. It
was clear an adjustment was on the way so I'd thankfully secured a gig in
health care where I hung out for the next two and a half years until I could
make another move. Those brick-and-mortar companies were flush with talent as
they were less impacted and benefitted from formerly hard to hire tech
workers. It was at least into 2005 before things started to pick up again in
the Seattle area such that you felt that you had any real latitude. Things are
different today - many more robust tech employers in the Seattle area,
especially in the city itself. Same rules apply though - just because you are
minting money doesn't mean you should increase your spending, as what goes up
always goes back down eventually.

------
mc3
It was tough to get my first job in 2001, but it wasn't end of the world
tough. I am not sure if it was the market of my inexperience at interviewing.
Probably a bit of both. The big name graduate recruiting companies of the time
were hiring a lot less, so there was a lot of demand for jobs. I took what I
could get.

------
issa
I'm surprised to be reading so many 9/11 related stories. In my memory the
dotcom bust was earlier than that.

~~~
gscott
For a long time after 9/11 there was a huge pullback on consumer spending felt
like a mini-recession.

------
thrawyfinfossil
_throwaway_ I was hired as the first software developer for an eCommerce
company in the late 90's. Little could I know at the time that writing secure
server software would become so lucrative. While I was not directly impacted
by the bust given my founding role and creative importance in value to the
organization never-the-less the bust did hit the business. Having been the
sole architect and first to create many of the founding technologies in
payments used everywhere today our company was being utilized by Paypal for
several years before they created this functionality themselves in house. The
bust was a cycle of economics unavoidable but looking at database records in
realtime for Ebay and therefore PayPal purchases of famous people was a way to
pass the time. And yes, I still create critical realtime systems.

------
masukomi
Business with no real plan for making money failed. Business who depended on
the clients being able to pay ridiculous prices with the VC money failed.

Basically, if it didn't provide critical and provable value to a business, its
money sources dried up, and it failed. Tons of people were laid off. They
stopped paying devs stupid high salaries, and competition for jobs was
_fierce_.

My advice, find your way to a company that saves other companies lots of money
(and makes that clear to them), that makes something other companies can't
live without, or is so tightly integrated with the functioning of its clients
that they can't get rid of it even if they want to.

Also, live frugally, and save money for the coming storm because there's a
good chance you'll get laid off. It doesn't matter how skilled you are or how
invaluable you think you are.

------
m0xte
I was stupid and took a major risk. I had a nice secure job in the defence
sector writing embedded software. This was a suddenly ramp up in work after
9/11\. But i had some ethical issues continuing in this space. I also
developed in internal web based asset tracking system and thought that was
more interesting. So I decided right in the middle of the crash to bail out
into a 6 person design agency start up. Fortunately they were vastly more
competent than their immediate competitors and vacuumed up the rest of their
work in no time at all.

For me, my salary doubled overnight, stress levels down, no bureaucracy, no
horrid tools to use, much better place to work. Best decision ever! But boy
was it a risk. Not everyone lost. There was a grand consolidation and if you
were in the right place it was a win.

------
thomascgalvin
I worked for a pretty "boring" company; we were never over-valued because of
the dot-com bubble, and as such we didn't take a big hit during the dot-com
burst.

The people that got taken to the cleaners were the ones who made websites
selling belly button rings for poodles and stuff like that. Everyone thought
adding "on the internet!" was worth a hundred million dollars back then, and a
lot of people wound up employed doing work that honestly didn't need to be
done.

But if you were in one of those boring companies, doing banking or whatever,
you were probably fine.

It was harder to switch jobs for a while, since there were a lot of people on
the market and not as many jobs, but I never saw the Reduction in Force scythe
swinging through my department.

------
ben7799
I came out of college in 1999 and went to work at Cisco. Cisco was pretty
terrible and I went to work at a startup in 2001 that was working on a GPRS
switch system.. (predecessor to 3G for mobiles.) . I was working on management
software.

We basically ran out of money as the bust happened. Alcatel had their eye on
buying us.. what they did is wait till the company was running out of money
and had laid everyone off in waves. Once the company was a skeleton they
bought it for a song. They had to hire a few of the principal engineers back
as consultants but not 24 year olds like me! There was some bad behavior along
the way from management, they were hiding the true financial situation from
the employees.

The other aspect of the bust I remember is a Morgan Stanley "financial
adviser" trying to take me for everything I was worth when I was leaving
Cisco. The Cisco stock was like $150/share or something when I was leaving. I
didn't have enough money to buy the shares. Morgan Stanley had some kind of
deal with Cisco where they assigned us financial advisers. The adviser was
trying to get me to take out a near six-figures loan to buy options on margin.
"You can just keep it for a year and then sell it and make a pretty penny
after paying off the loan!" I declined and within a month or two of my leaving
the bust hit and my shares would have been underwater by > $100 a share. It
would have seriously messed up my financial future in a major way. That guy
was such a crook.

The actual layoff in the bust wasn't that bad but it still set me back a bit.
I was out of work for about 2 months, I lived with my parents for a bit but
found a contract that I kept for 2 years. Taking the contracting work was
pretty lucrative but not that smart in the long term. After that 2 year stint
things were still pretty bad as that was the era of "outsourcing overseas is
the future!" and I had another 2 years of sideways work that wasn't great for
my career. Things started looking up in 2006 and were vastly better by 2010.
The "great recession" had 0 effect on me.

I was totally delusional in my early to mid 20s about how easy it was going to
be to work at a startup and be successful. It was also a super different era
in terms of office and overall culture. You were a near social pariah as soon
as anyone found out you were a software engineer, it was 100% not cool to be a
tech worker. Women would immediately lose interest in you and practically run
away as soon as they heard the word engineer. We were all still 100%
considered nerds, not cool in any way. Also there were NO young people in the
office. In my 20s there was almost no job I ever had were there was anyone
else in the office under 20.

Other aspects I remember.. almost no perks in the office, way more crunch
time, much longer hours at the startups. In the last 10 years I worked at 3
startups, one had the long hours like a 1990s-early 2000s startup, but the
others are/were so incredibly cushy that it felt like no work was getting
done. People yelled a lot more in the office. Stuff that was regularly done
then would be considered abusive today and would generate lots of reports to
HR.

AFAICT around 2010 when everyone started saying "Millenials" a lot things
really, really changed in our industry. Mostly for the better.

In 2002 when I got layed off (Boston area) it was pretty grim. The war in Iraq
had not started. So there was an absolute army of highly qualified highly
experienced engineers that had been laid off by the defense contractors.
Career fairs were scary scenes. Obviously they all went back to defense as
soon as the Iraq war started... so the rest of us who weren't interested in
the defense path didn't have to compete with them. But it was real scary going
to career fairs.

A lot of job postings at that time in the bust had ridiculous/fake
requirements. You'd see things like "10 years of experience in J2EE". J2EE was
new and hot. But it was like 2-3 years old at that point! The postings were
mostly about companies trying to fake that they were doing well... put up the
fake job postings to make it look like you were growing when in actuality they
were barely hanging on.

------
tootie
I took a 5% pay cut at an incredibly boring bank. But I wasn't unemployed at
all. My dotcom job was nothing amazing. They teased an IPO but never got
within a mile of it. My salary ($65k?) felt like a fortune at 22 years old but
wasn't astronomical.

------
laurentoget
I moved to the US in 2000 with a Ph.D. in computer science to join a startup
that was supposed to become the new Cisco. I had no kid at the time and had an
H1B visa so i stayed on for the first paycut, the second paycut, the office
downsizing and the third paycut. Had a rough few months when the investors
finally pulled the plug and i had to find someone who would transfer my visa
in 2005, but by then things were on the rebound.

A lot of the american guys who left around 2003 got in real estate and house
remodeling, setting themselves up for another burst. The immigrants went to
take on boring jobs maintaining legacy code or installing Oracle solutions for
a few years before things warmed up.

------
segmondy
Fear, that's what it was. You never really know how well your company is doing
till the shake down time.

Companies you thought were doing well go out of business. Companies you had as
a backup to maybe apply if you lose your job go out of business before yours.
So many unemployed developers fighting for the few jobs out there. Hiring
freeze in most places. Whatever job you have even if it's tethering on the
edge becomes the most secure job.

Layoffs were brutal, I saw someone got laid off on their start date! Those
that worked for 3 months before layoff were lucky.

What can you do about it? Nothing! It's like being in the middle of a war
zone, you can only pray you don't get hit by shrapnel.

------
PeterStuer
Many jobs in those days were paid for to a high degree in stock options. Since
valuations were so inflated everyone in the game was mega-rich on paper.

When the bubble burst, this created a bifurcation. Those who's options vested
in the months pre-crash did become wealthy and didn't need to work ever again.
Those that just missed that window even by just a month not only did not
become multimillionaire, they even had lost years in normal capital buildup as
the non-option wages had ofc not been that high.

This left a profound imprint on a generation. It was so abundantly clear that
there was no relation between work and wealth. Two devs that had sat side by
side working on the same code for years, one now had a Lambo in the drive on
his mansion in the hills and spent the rest of his days playing ceo/cto/cio in
ventures in which he bought a chair just for fun. The other looking for a job
that paid money to buy rent and food for the month. The only difference
between them that the former was hired one month earlier by the dotcom.

These devs were seldom born into money. Their parents had taught them that
working hard paid. Those words rang very hollow in this new age of casino
capitalism.

------
bshenanigan
I went skiing in New Zealand. Then I went skiing in Chile. Then I went skiing
in Austria.

------
midnitewarrior
I worked at a large web incubator, we build web sites and applications and
helped out clients find funding and tried to support them in other ways. Round
after round of layoffs. People were on edge. We had offices around the globe,
maybe a dozen or more. The final straw was 9/11, as our largest client was
revamping their national hotel chain website. Their occupancy went down to 4%
and the whole multi-months-long web site development project was mothballed. I
was one of the chosen few to stick around and work in the last office of the
company that ended up splitting off into its own company.

------
YourMatt
I lasted until a third round of layoffs. I got lucky in that a friend had a
lead on a job in the mortgage industry, writing loan origination document
software. Within a week, I was riding the next catastrophic bubble.

------
gerbilly
I had been a freelance consultant for about ten years, working through
headhunters and by word of mouth.

Around April 2002 my contract was not renewed and I spent four months unable
to find one. The freelance contract market seemed to dry up.

I had to go work as a full time employee for less than half the pay in
Montréal (I live in Toronto). I commuted five hours by train each weekend for
a year.

Ironically, the crappy company that hired me referred to me as a 'consultant'.

My hours went towards implementing KYC regulation for a big American bank.

The upside is that I got to live and work in French among my people for a
while (I am French Canadian).

------
mcv
If you had a job, you had a job. But if you lost the job, it could be really
hard to find a new one. I lost my job and spent a year unemployed. And then
the slump was over and I suddenly had 3 jobs to choose from.

~~~
sgt
Simple enough answer but true for many folks. Lots of jobs were kept and you'd
just go about your business.

------
sys_64738
9/11 truly tanked the economy. Business stopped for a month after that
terrible day and it took years to recover. Seeing friends lose their jobs
never get easy no matter how many times you say your goodbyes.

~~~
H8crilA
9/11 happened in the middle of the recession. It wasn't the cause.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
For me, it was pretty good. I was working at a medical devices company on a
new product. Upper management was all too aware of what was happening out in
the .com world. They didn't want to risk losing the core developers to .com
riches, so a few of us got "shhh, don't tell anyone else" retention bonuses to
make it less likely that we'd quit.

It was nice getting free money with no strings attached for a few years while
still doing a job I loved. Kinda sucked when the gravy train stopped, though.

------
danbmil99
This could be a book but I'll do the tldr for this thread. We were a small
scrappy startup with our own video compression and streaming tech. We had just
gone public and raised 15 million dollars, and were pivoting to being a
content company (because tech sucks and content is king if you are in the year
1999).

Our lead investor was great. He told me again and again that we were in a
bubble, and to focus on the core technology as a backstop in case the bubble
burst.

After the crash, our $40 stock went down to $0.06. I went from being a multi-
millionaire on paper to being broke-ass for real. The CEO and I had to fire
110 people, cutting the staff down to about 25. We jettisoned the content
portal and refocused on the core IP.

In the end amazingly, the company survived and was eventually acquired by
Google.

It was tough letting people go but the alternative was for the company to go
bankrupt and everybody to lose everything.

------
VERTICAL_BAR
My story is that I survived the first round of redundancies at an internet
startup, but was made redundant in the second round.

It hit me hard, and there were so many people looking for programming jobs
that I found it impossible to find a new job. I didn't handle things very
well, and ended up doing jobs like washing-up and putting up marquees.

The story ends happily though, I found a good software job fairly soon, and
those other jobs I did in between gave me a bit of experience of life, a bit
of perspective.

------
achenatx
I was at a dotcom that busted (after going public). Developers were laid off
left and right. But the internet economy hadnt taken hold yet and the tech
companies were mainly still old school shrink wrapped software.

i started my own company at that time and there were a ton of developers
desperate for work.

Because of the huge internet companies that are voraciously hiring and that
have huge warchests, I think it will be different next time around.

I can see IT at non tech companies getting laid off and having trouble finding
work.

------
circlefavshape
Was working for a web agency during the dotcom bust, I was one of the few devs
not laid off cos I volunteered to work part time (2.5 days a week) so I could
spend time on my band. Did that for a year and a half, then freelanced for a
couple of years until I got taken on by a client ... and then 2008 hit.
Employer laid a couple of people off, paid us late one month, but it wasn't
nearly as bad as the dotcom bust and I found other work without any trouble

------
Spearchucker
I had around 10 years' experience by then. Found a dream job in London but
they imploded two days after I started.

Took me six months to find something else. And that turned out to be an OK job
with EDS, but at half what I was earning before. By 2004 when things had
started to recover they seemed to get a fright because I suddenly got 3 raises
in 4 months which almost tripled my salary. Was too late though, because
during that time I was interviewing at Microsoft.

Crazy times.

------
mekane8
I was an undergrad in CS as the bubble burst (graduated Dec. 2002). I was
planning to attend graduate school in CS when I graduated but the market was
flooded with people laid of from their dotcom jobs going back to school. I
went abroad and was a volunteer teacher for a few years, then came home and
found a nice entry-level web development job. Very happy that I got to see the
world before I settled into a career.

------
bsenftner
I was director of research for a live video over the internet startup. This
being pre-Flash video, it was quite a bit of engineering. We had live events,
interactive sessions with popular bands, and game shows. Then in about a
month, it all disappeared. I returned to the video game industry, which I'd
been trying to leave for some time... After a stint doing a PS2 game for
Pandemic, I went into visual effects.

------
ralphc
I switched jobs in 1998, and was at a biggish, stable company in the Atlanta
area, feeling lucky as I heard about stories like this out in California.

When it happens again, I don't think it will be as bad. In addition to
learning from the lessons of the past, remember that everyone had to buy
hardware, servers, big-ass monitors, all that. Now personal laptops are
cheaper plus everything's on AWS now, you scale up or down.

~~~
dan-robertson
What are AWS to do if their demand suddenly falls and they have enormous
amounts of idle hardware?

~~~
jlawer
Flip it on Amazon

------
christkv
I had just taken a consulting job and had been at the company for about 2
weeks when 9/11 happened. One week later we got laid off. Turns out I was
lucky to get laid off early. Managed to get a job at a bank before the big
consulting companies started their purges. Sat through the dotcom bust in a
bank and then moved on in 2003 when times had improved again and there were
more opportunities.

------
ThrowMeAwayOkay
I was told I would not be hired during an interview:

"...you are more of a client-server programmer. We are looking for more of a
mainframe programmer..."

------
collyw
Close to impossible to find a job as a new graduate.

------
mathattack
I worked for a large consultancy. The folks who survived were the ones who
stayed at clients 100%. It was partially independent of technical skill. (More
soft skills and luck). When things got ugly, the 10X developers landed at big
tech companies, where most stayed. (Equity gains since have made up for comp
drops) The average developers left the Bay Area. Big exodus.

------
maypo
i joined eToys as a developer in the formative days. worked it hard thru the
IPO. the S1 sits in a bookshelf. i left when the company still had gas in the
tank, but the writing was on the wall. really smart technical people started
to leave. i joined them. the bubble had yet to burst.

i cashed out, cut expenses, played golf during the day, coded at night. as the
bubble burst, i was already chasing the next thing. never having to witness
the layoffs and heartache was a blessing in disguise.

as the bubble burst, startup funding dried up. no one was funding 'an idea'
yet it was also a great time to be working on the problems of tomorrow.

having cash on hand was important...it allowed me to relax when others where
in a panic

finding work was not hard. having talent always matters.

fast forward to today. its been about a year since i exited a startup that was
acquired. outside the bubble again, cash in hand, coding without a worry

i'm already 'dug in' and working on the next thing,

------
directionless
There weren't a lot of jobs.

I was at one place through much of the boom, eventually they folded. I was the
last employee, part of my job was winding down and archiving the assets. After
that, jobs were a bit scarce.

I didn't mind the break, though it was a bit demoralizing. Much like today, if
you can create a name for yourself, it's easier to get hired.

------
mkarliner
I was at the epicenter of the bust, in London consulting for boo.com, who were
at least partially triggering the crash.

After some months on the beach because my company simply couldn't get the
ludicrous rates they had previously been getting, I landed up joining the
fledgling Shazam.

Sometimes the best time for a startup is in the teeth of a crash...

------
ta1357924680
I see a lot of comments referencing 9/11 as a big cause of the downturn and am
curious... why? Given the size and power of the US, the 9/11 attack was just a
pinprick. Was it the social and government reaction to 9/11 that actually
caused the damage? If so, was any of it deliberately engineered?

~~~
newnewpdro
9/11 had nothing causal to do with it. I suspect it's just a prominent
negative event in history that became associated with all sorts of negative
things going on in the same era. Also people's memories aren't exactly
perfect, especially when it comes to precisely ordering and absolutely placing
the distant past on a timeline.

------
chi_features
Not specific to devs, but I do highly recommend the documentary Startup.com –
it's a rollercoaster ride of the highs and lows of that era.

Free to view on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuiUXOTE4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuiUXOTE4M)

------
jariel
It was psychologically worse than it actually was due to 9/11 and the war
buildup which was really, really stranger.

The 'crash' was a very well needed market correction as few startups had
figured out how to make money - and a lot of regular stocks were way
overvalued.

It was a little rough for devs, but honestly, anyone with decent chops had a
decent chance of securing 'something' \- either in the Bay or elsewhere.

There was a huge drop off in marketing, biz dev etc. over the span of a few
months it went form 'a lot of parties' to almost none!

It recovered somewhat after a few years - Google did an IPO that went really
well. Then the Facebook craze started.

The 20008 crisis was much, much worse as it hit the entire American economy in
a very powerful way - not just a stock/.com correction.

FYI the 'telecom bubble' was 5x bigger than the '.com' bubble, there were huge
investments in optical switch companies you never heard about that went bust.

That said - the buzz since 2012 has been stronger than in .com. During .com
all this zany stuff, startups etc. were completely new. So it was completely
new math. By 2010-2012 - or say the real establishment of YC, a lot of the
zanyiness had been normalised and it metastasised throughout the world in a
way. The valuations these days are 10x-100x bigger and the game is
significantly more global. In .com companies that did a $500M IPO were 'huge'
or whatever. Nowadays, it's almost not going to make the news.

The correction that's coming eventually probably won't be as severe as there's
no reason for a real crash. Something will give - probably China slowdown -
which will pop a lot of other bubbles. To give you an example - WeWorks'
valuation was not actually that crazy - as long as they could continue to
raise (and it's not entirely irrational) then they could move ahead. The
$50B->$10B drop is not some crazy mis-calculation so much as it is an example
of the leverage being applied. A little bit of wind out of the sails and lack
of momentum can kill something that might actually be working (and WeWork
actually does have some workable metrics, just not at $50B).

So the coming adjustment will affect 'everyone' even if it is really only
driven materially by a few things (i.e. China, trade etc.) though probably not
severely.

If you do good job and have reasonable skills, I wouldn't worry too much.

------
epc
Just an aside: it was very popular for dotcom era startups to issue NQSO
options instead of ISO options. NQSOs cause tax hits when the options vest,
where ISOs do not. So when you read about people getting massive tax bills
with options for worthless stock, they were likely NQSO options.

------
protomyth
A lot of regular developers were working on Y2K modifications to enterprise
programs. That was a person intensive effort and was very successful. In a lot
of cases it wasn't very easy. I get the feeling that 32-bit gates in embedded
control devices will not be taken as seriously.

------
tunesmith
I was working at a dotcom, a geocities knockoff, that had recently gone public
and had climbed up to around $30/share. I had options that I had already
exercised as I was being clever thinking I'd sell them after holding them for
a year. But I was still locked out as an employee, and we all watched as the
the price dropped over a period of weeks. After a while it was under my
exercise price so I lost money. All told it wasn't a lot of options and not a
lot of money I lost either. A couple of decades later I sold the position to
take the loss and offset other stock gains.

The layoffs happened in two rounds - the first round the severance packages
were rumored to be generous. The second round, my round, we got two weeks pay.

This was spring of 2001. People had trouble finding a job, but they were still
out there. I got another one for summer of 2001 but they laid me off after
three months, and then 9/11 happened ten days later.

After that it was brutal. Up here in Portland, no one was hiring at all. One
time a job opening came up and all the applicants were taken to a large
conference room where we all took a silent written exam together, with
applicant names anonymized to protect against discrimination. I got that offer
and rejected it, which completely freaked out the agency recruiter that was
representing me. Nike and Intel would occasionally advertise programming
contracts for $12/hour - php, perl - and they would be swarmed with
applicants. I'd talk to agency recruiters but they kept getting laid off, so
it'd be a different one every couple of weeks.

I was taking unemployment, I toyed with a business idea, and I eventually
thought I'd try out contracting - I cold-called a prospective client that had
a small company, and he brought me on for $25/hour, usually working at his
condo with him and ordering pizza together. A few months later - Feb. of 2002
I believe, I got my first more official-ish contract for $55/hour, and I've
been in business as a backend architectural contractor/consultant ever since.

Over that period of tim, I found that consulting is kind of a leading
indicator of the economy. When times are bad, maybe you can get good gigs at
employers that need help but are reluctant to commit to an employee. But if
times are just starting to _go_ bad, non-employees can be let go quicker.

Anyways, remember that the dotcom crash got mixed up with the post-9/11 chaos,
so the next crash probably won't have the same impact. Also, remember that
recessions are cyclical. It gets better _by definition_. I still believe that
2001 and 2007 were Weird in a way that recessions usually aren't. And a
recession might even be good for the younger generation since they tend to
clear away people that have jobs but shouldn't, leaving more future openings
for the folks that are still hustling and learning.

------
Animats
This is what it was like.[1]

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20010302130953/http://www.sfgirl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010302130953/http://www.sfgirl.com/)

------
taneq
I was in my last year of university when it crashed. 'Entry level' job
openings were getting high level applicants with 10+ years experience. Of the
37 people in my year, something like 30 stayed on to do PhDs due to the
impossibility of landing a job.

------
jvagner
My company was 12 minutes from going public, and it got pulled. That’s a fun
story to reflect on.

------
rukuu001
I was a junior enterprise dev at the time, and was largely shielded from any
fallout. Felt lucky to have work, but safe.

Now, I’m highly exposed to startup economy, older and spend more time managing
than coding, so...... feeling a little shaky right now.

------
Scuds
As a college student, I can remember my school's engineering job fair in 1999
taking up three floors of the student union building. In 2000 (2001?) it was
down to one floor and nothing but companies like HP, IBM, and Microsoft.

------
w1nst0nsm1th
I wasn't there but I heard it was great : You could swipe your ass with stocks
bundled in paper roll.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=arENYYkYBts](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=arENYYkYBts)

~~~
sgt
Swipe or wipe?

------
erikstarck
Started a company with some friends in May 1999. Company was acquired (with
stocks) in February 2000. Everything crashed in March. Lost basically all the
money during the coming year. Stock is still 99% down from peak. Crazy days.

------
2rsf
Almost a non event for me, I was working for a small, but not a startup
anymore, successful company that was lucky enough to not get severely hit by
the bubble.

Salary raises were lower, and bonuses more modest but overall we continued as
usual.

------
kitsune_
From the end of 2000 to the start of 2002 I did a stint at a web agency right
out of high school in order to save up some money for college. Roughly a month
or so after 9/11 150 out of the 300 employees were laid off.

------
pmorici
I was in college at the time but I distinctly remember buying a few shares of
Amazon for around $9 each with my remaining savings. I sold them 10 years
after graduating which in retrospect was too soon.

------
alfiedotwtf
I graduated the year it popped... nobody was hiring, especially people with no
experience. Out of about 200 compsci my year, I doubt 10 got a job that year
doing anything computer related. It was brutal.

------
ddgflorida
2001 - out of work for a year and sending resumes everywhere. I'd call and ask
"Did you get my resume"? The reply - "Yes, your resume and a thousand others".

------
danilocesar
This is the most useful thread in HN in years.

As someone who started his engineering career after the burst, is good to hear
the experiences (good ones and bad ones) before the next one burst.

~~~
wayoutthere
This bust will be very different than the first tech bubble. The first tech
bubble laid off a lot of folks working for small (<50 people) startups. This
next one is going to hammer the giants. It's going to _really_ hurt.

Most of the valuation of big tech companies came from their terminal value
(which was unknown for a long time because the business models haven't been
proven). That value is now better known, but valuations haven't come down to
earth because there has been so much foreign money flowing in to the US
because investors just have nowhere else to put it.

The other unknown in all of this is the student debt bubble. I have a feeling
the next recession is going to trigger a wave of bankruptcies as the knowledge
workers that will get laid off will no longer be making payments on their
student debt.

~~~
chrshawkes
You can't bankrupt out of student debts in the USA.

------
SteveSmith16384
As someone who was a dev for small but established company that wasn't purely
internet facing, I didn't even notice. (Not being snarky, just saying for
balance).

------
wessorh
I was the last person left at my company in 2008. It was a one person company,
after I fired my best friend so he could go to India and drive tuck-tucks.

I moved my operations to a organic farm in the east bay. My wife and I were
shoveling horse shit one afternoon with some community volunteers that just
happened to be the Comcast Ethernet sales team. That is how we got the fiber.

I pulled a 40' "high cube" shipping container into one of the greenhouses
<lots of illegal stuff deleted> and now operate on some dirt that will be
flooded in 50 years. Elevation 4ft above sealevel.

I'm surrounded by homeless transients on 4 sides. My wife left me this year
and she killed all the plants. I'm really happy because of the drugs, and
sunshine.

Y'all should get out more -- dig in the dirt, make food and write code in a
non-toxic environment.

------
icedchai
Pretty much the same for me (east coast.) I moved from a startup to a more
stable software company for a few years. My startup stock options were worth
nothing.

------
dsfyu404ed
In threads discussing career paths there seems to be an implicit assumption
that everyone has agency and the ability to make their own decisions and
results are simply a matter of choosing the right advice to listen to and
doing the work you need to do at each step of the way. If we were discussing
career paths in the context of wealth the assumption would be that nobody has
agency and everyone is just a product of the environment they were born into
and what you do is predetermined.

So which is is guys? Can we actually choose are own career paths or are we
just pissing in the wind here?

------
baud147258
here's an inside story from a developper in a DotCom era web company:

[https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35194](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35194)

He's also explaining a lot of entrepreneur/technical details, since most of
his usual audience is not familiar with those, unlike HN.

------
jacobsenscott
I worked at large stable companies and only knew there was a dot com bust
because I read the news. Business as usual.

------
christophilus
Fear mongers will fear monger. Dire predictions are rarely accurate,
especially at the macro economic level.

I was a software engineer through that time period, and for me it was a non
event. If you’re working at a profitable business and not some negative
billion dollar growth company, you’ll be fine. Software engineers are going to
be in demand for a while yet.

------
EliRivers
If you were a regular dev - one of the majority of software engineers - you
probably didn't notice it beyond news articles or the like. You were working
for some company that hadn't been part of the dot com bubble and wasn't
reliant on dot com bubble companies as customers.

------
kukkeliskuu
Joined a tech company in summer of 2000 after the dotcom bubble had already
burst, but many people still thought tech market would bounce back. The
company was able to raise around 60 million just after I joined. Located to
Silicon Valley few months later. (This was already part of the deal when I
joined.)

The product we were making was quite solid and also quite generic, but the
management/investors decided to concentrate on dotcom related markets which
ultimately went bust later. Our core development team did not suffer that
much, but around us there were so many layoffs I lost count. I personally
survived at least five layoffs.

It was actually quite interesting time to live in Silicon Valley. My coworkers
all still believed in dotcoms although those companies had lost much of their
market value. I had just taken some introductory finance classes and knew that
fundamentally all this was unsound -- and had some interesting chats
explaining to coworkers that diversifying means more than investing in few
different dotcom stocks.

I continued to work there as the work was interesting, pay was good and it was
interesting to see Silicon Valley through the disillusionment phase as it is
part of the history.

Since I was working only for one company I did not have very wide vision, but
it seemed to me Silicon Valley was full of gold diggers at the time. It was
quite something to see several minutes of job ads before movies, for example.

The company did very crazy decisions. Their goal was to get listed in NASDAQ,
and for this all the graphs had to show exponential growth no matter whether
it was unsustainable. This meant stupid hiring, offices in all continents etc.

By stupid hiring I mean that some people were clearly hired just for the head
count, not to provide any real valuable service. But our core development was
kind of inner ring that was protected and continued doing interesting work
throughout all the craziness around.

I was once traveling with the CEO and he told me that he had just come off
from meeting with the investors -- they had demanded that the expenses should
be raised to $1M per month.

The company burned through the money in the three years I was there, basically
on offices, stupid hiring and travel. After I traveled in economy class in
overseas flights, I was told that everybody else was traveling business class.
The chairman of the board insisted on traveling first class. There was
actually one BOFH who insisted on first class travel too (he had to set up the
infra for the offices), and I think they accepted it too.

In 2002 I had enough, so I relocated back where to I came from. One year later
I quit the company. The constant layoffs impacted the mood of the company so
much I did not want to work there anymore.

I took a sabbatical year, finished my second master's degree and spent three
months doing volunteer work. After the sabbatical I joined the company where I
had left before I went to work in Silicon Valley.

I was not unemployed (against my own will) for one single day throughout all
this. I think what saved me was that I had saved so much that I could be
independent for a year, that I worked with smart people who recognized my
talents although I was still quite young developer. But mostly it was luck, I
guess.

I would not trade away the experience.

------
mgarfias
I had a job until oct 2001. Then laid off. Traffic got a lot better too.

------
kls
TLDR - your going to be fine.

I lived thru it, I did OK, a few of my friends left the industry some
struggled most where ok if they had real software chops. The people that
really took the hit where network / sys-admins / corp PC repair-support they
where gutted as there was a glut of MCSE/A+/whatever get a cert in 4 weeks
make 100k.

That being said, this time it is structurally different, in that period, we
where trying to eat the world with software today software has eaten the
world. Development has always been and always will be an understaffed
profession as it competes for the top half of the intellect spectrum along
with Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers etc.

It's easy to assume that you have to be at least smarter than half the
population to write software. From there you have the slackers that take
themselves out of the pool e.g guy could be Einstein but he would rather smoke
pot and work at 7-11. Might not be a significant portion of the population but
it takes a bite.

Then the person actually has to want, desire and be interested in being a
developer over some other intellect based career. Then a portion of us just
burn out and leave.

Anyways there are a lot of factors that lead to a serious shortage in
available developers and as best as I can reason it is systemic and incurable
until AI gets to the point where it can turn a persons thoughts into software.

I would armchair guess that the pool of potential good developers worldwide is
10% of the population. Those that actually pursue it and stay with it is
certainly far less.

Tangential, but that is what I love about these younger companies and their
age discrimination and asinine interview processes. They lack the experience
to know that their perceived cool factor actually holds no currency and the
real currency is in attracting and retaining good development talent. They
build so many self defeating filters to them accomplishing that goal.

------
exabrial
I went to work as a corporate drone. It was spirit crushing.

------
Traubenfuchs
"youngish" & "28"

With 27 I feel like a fossil that will die alone and in poverty if it won't
make manager or architect within a year.

------
m463
Lots of MOPs - Millionaires On Paper.

------
limnetwork5
Probably you should check zoho way

------
johngalt
The biggest thing about history is that we know how it ends. Nothing really
captures the uncertainty of the moment. 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 wasn't coming back.

It wasn't 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. It's not just that your project was
dead, but no one would even be there to bury it.

The impact crater was still visible years later. Remember the big talent
shortages during 2008-2012? That's 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, and why don't they work for peanuts like they used to?"

The silver lining is that the bubble bursting shook off the con-artists and
pretenders. The dotcom boom was driven mostly by piles of dumb money chasing
anyone who could spell the word 'software'. There was a very specific feeling
of _dilution_ during the run up. Dealing with companies and teams that
contained no competence of any kind. Just lots of people with grand plans.
Remember that this was 5+ years before the 'fizz buzz' test became a thing.

During the boom, being a skilled professional felt like you were a hunted
animal rather than a valued team member. Everyone had to get in on this
'internet thing' and they would desperately try to latch on. Imagine working
in a company of 500, and only two or three actual programmers. Everyone else
has 40hrs a week to hassle you for help with whatever their project is while
kissing up to management. Think of a tech conference that is entirely shiny
salesmen, business types and politics. Tons of fancy titles with no ability to
execute. An impenetrable crowd of people trying to suck up time and gain
influence. Those types disappeared first.

------
at-fates-hands
A lot of people forget that telecom was a major mover during the dot com boom
years. I was in the industry and it was the Wild West with deregulation and
new technology being borne every day to try and corner the high speed internet
markets.

I worked at several floundering telecom companies out of college and it was
all rainbows and unicorns, "We're going to change the world!" VC money was
coming in like crazy, but I saw red flags everywhere.

Best example was at the last telecom I worked at. They had managed to get a
specific contract with Qwest that gave them enterprise level rates on PBX
lines for small companies. Basically the state had given sweetheart rates to
the huge corporate players in my home state of MN. 3M, Honeywell, Mayo Clinic
and others were paying next to nothing for their lines, but because of the
volume, Qwest was still making a ton of money every month. One of the founders
was an attorney and told Qwest there was a clause that stated they needed to
give that rate to everybody, not just these huge corporations. They actually
had public hearings and everybody was asleep at the wheel. The FCC allowed
this company a five year contract for the same rates, the only catch was each
entity who got the rates had to have a minimum of 10 lines. Then, after five
years, the contract would expire and the loophole would be closed.

When I was hired, the CEO told me they wanted to have the highest paid sales
staff. He laid out the salary and commission structure and red flags went up
(see below). After I was hired, I found out the CEO bought season tickets for
all the major sports teams in town (that included the Twins, the Timberwolves,
The Wild and the Vikings), two of the teams (Vikings and Wild), he got a
suite. The office we were in was already way too big. We had a staff of about
a dozen, and it was big enough for a company of about triple that size. No
matter, he spent a ton of money to completely remodel the whole office in his
vision. They had around $3 million privately invested and he blew through that
with his excessive spending and staff payroll in about 4 months.

It was then shit got really interesting (more on that in a bit)

Here was the salary+commission structure:

Salary was $45K/year

Commission structure looked like this:

You were paid per line with a commission structure that ramped up as the
number of lines increased.

The math went like this:

\- (Less than 20 lines was paid out at $60/line)

\- 20 line minimum: $1,000

\- 35 lines: $2,000

\- 40 lines: $3,000

\- 50+ lines: $4,000

Let's say you landed three clients in the same building and you got a 40 line
deal. This means you got your base salary for the month which was around
$3,700 plus you got commission on every level of your deal so you added
another $5K on top of your salary. Once I started working there, I found out
the company was only clearing $25/per line, per month in revenue. It doesn't
take a genius to see that and start to panic.

If you sold a 40 line deal and the company was paying out $5K in commission,
but was only making $25/line in revenue, it would literally take 16 years
_just to break even_. I started asking around, since this wasn't making much
sense. I started talking with the engineers, some of who were given stock
options in the company. Most wouldn't talk to me, but I got in good with one
and he said this whole thing was a scam. The idea was to grow the business
rapidly, shed all the VC money and then once it was bought by a larger telecom
company, everybody would cash out and start another company. Rinse and repeat
as necessary. I suddenly realized I was in a very bad position, but it was
already too late.

Once the CEO had torched through most of the money, a war started between the
investors. There were six private investors. Apparently they had a meeting to
discuss the dire straights of the company. Three of the investors wanted to
put in more money and keep it going until the company could grow enough where
they could still sell it for a healthy profit. The other three wanted out. One
half sued the other half. The other half counter sued. Two days later, I came
to the office and a security guard greeted me and told me I wasn't going to
work. The doors were locked by way of court order and the company was
effectively shut down pending legal cases.

Less than a week later, the bottom fell out of the economy and the dot boom
was suddenly the dot com _bust_

The lessons I learned (if even from the outside) from that experience really
helped when I started several of my own companies. I have yet to take VC
money. I've been able to bootstrap all of my companies on my own, with minimal
investment. I run as close to bare steel as possible. No offices, no hardware,
bare minimum for my overhead expenses. Try and do as much with as little as
you need. Pick a niche market and address a specific problem and then own that
niche. Try to stay away from larger players in already well established
markets. And for fucks sake, never, ever, ever pay your employees a kings
ransom to work for you.

Sorry for the long ramble, but I love telling this story. It has so many
lessons in it for founders and other people in the startup world.

------
bartread
I finished a masters in September 2000, by which time the wave had already
started to break: I'm not sure it was a big deal anywhere other than the UK,
but boo.com went under in May 2000.

I'd moved back home to Dorset to do my project and thesis as our landlord had
sold the flat we were renting in London, and it didn't feel like the best
moment to be househunting.

I also had an offer in hand with a b2b eCommerce agency in London, along with
a couple of other friends, so my plan had been to move back to the city in the
autumn. However, over the summer we received an email from them asking us to
defer our join dates by a couple of months, during which time they'd pay us a
small weekly stipend.

This was nice because it felt like free money (I was being paid £150/week to
do literally nothing), and in the meantime I made a contact through a friend
with a guy running a tiny software company in a village a few miles from where
I lived and started contracting for him on a telecoms switching system.
Together, these pushed my income to about £470/week which, at the time, felt
like a ton. In fact it was more than the starting salary I'd been offered with
the firm in London.

The guy I was contracting for liked my work and started pushing me to work for
him as a full time employee. He dangled matching my London salary in front of
me, which obviously would go quite a bit further in sleepy Dorset.

Eventually I caved and gave notice to the company in London. The downside is
that I had to give them the stipend back, but I'd been judicious in setting it
aside just in case this happened. Still, that £1500 would have come in handy,
and I still kick myself for the way this turned out because I should have seen
it coming: a few days after I'd given notice and sent them a cheque they let
all new starters go. The reason I kick myself is that had they let me go I
could have kept the stipend.

On balance I was much luckier than everybody else though: I still had a job
with the company in Dorset, and I was now a salaried employee, so _way_
luckier than everybody who was cut. The worst I had to deal with was emergency
tax for months (which I eventually got back) because the company in London
couldn't get their act together to give me a P45: I still remember the email
they sent telling me it "wasn't a business priority". Well, maybe, I mean when
the place is disintegrating around you, but I still need it.

In many ways that first job wasn't great, but it did have some strong upsides:
working on lots of different and interesting projects, client contact, 20
minute commute, good salary (for the area), great scenery. It also ranks as
the only time in my career when I had my own office: the upper floor of an old
thatched cottage.

On the downside there weren't really any other devs in the company: a couple
of guys did sysadmin work on the ISP side of the business, and built the odd
website in PHP, but nothing full on. My boss was a programmer, and whilst we
had some good technical discussions, he could be a bit old skool in the way he
did things. I needed more people around who I could learn from. Related to
this I learned that I don't really enjoy working substantially alone.

My boss wasn't a bad guy, but our relationship could be fractious, and I could
be pretty immature/something of a diva, which didn't really help.

I actually handed in my notice after less than a year because the stress was
getting to me, but my boss persuaded me to stay and gave me a 20% salary
increase. Like I say, he was a decent guy. I'm also really glad he did that
because I probably would have been ____ed by my naivety otherwise (had no new
job lined up).

Still, there was more to my issues with the job than money, so it didn't take
long to realise I still wanted to leave.

I began applying for jobs but the problem was there just wasn't much around
for people with a year's experience. Plenty if you had 4 years, and obviously
there were graduate roles (but these would have been a substantial pay cut
and, by this time, I had car payments to make - buying a car on finance as
soon as I got my first job definitely not my finest piece of decision-making
ever). But I was really struggling. I'd make sure I ticked every box for every
requirement when I applied for jobs, and I'd hear nothing back.

Eventually I heard back from a company in Cambridge that I'd applied to months
before - never heard back from anyone else. Things were pretty grim at work
(the atmosphere was tense and funereal and it went way beyond any issues
between the boss and I) so when I walk into this shiny, new refurbished office
in Cambridge, with all these friendly people I pretty much instantly decided
that regardless of what happened I _wanted_ this job. Fortunately I got it,
along with a modest salary increase and relocation expenses - started in June
2002.

Good thing too because the company I was working for in Dorset substantially
imploded a few months later leaving only the boss and his wife behind, and the
other three employees let go. A sad end really. It could have been awesome, it
should have been awesome, but it just wasn't. It was still limping along a
decade later but I think is now gone completely.

Ironically I'd picked another company, in the bioinformatics sector, who
weren't exactly having a great time. They'd IPO'd, with much brouhaha, in 2000
or 2001 and had raised something like 160M euro, with a share price trading
about 100 euro. By the time I arrived the shares were trading at around 3
euros and they'd burned a ton of the cash on a bunch of questionable
acquisitions.

There were layoffs before I'd joined, and more whilst I was there, although
these left the Cambridge office substantially untouched, I think mostly
because we were working on a product that was making sales.

One immediate and massive improvement is that I got on well with my boss, and
there were a bunch of great people around. I got to see other peoples' code,
and be involved in some design sessions with other devs, which was all new. We
also used source control - hurrah! I did lose the direct customer contact, and
the variety of work, which I missed a lot from my previous job. There also
seemed to be just an unbelievable (to me, at the time) amount of politicking -
thinking back that's not really surprising given the state of the company.
Sadly, I realised pretty soon (a month or two in) that I needed to find
another job, but I had to wait out the first year so I wouldn't have to pay
back relocation expenses.

My next job was a contract. I'd seen it advertised and it was paying literally
twice what I was on, and it was the _only_ job I'd seen in months that I
seemed qualified for. I nailed all the requirements except one: I wasn't Java
certified. I phoned up the recruiter anyway and told them I was going to be
taking my Java certification within the next month, then I booked the exam,
then I spent every evening devouring the certification manuals. Another guy
had gone for the position but decided he didn't like one of the people there
so, once I had the certification, I went for interview and got the contract
(August 2003). I don't know what the people issue was with the other guy but I
had a _great_ 9 months there: absolutely loved it, and loved working with a
great group of devs.

I mean, of course, the company wasn't in the best shape, and they sold off
part of the business - the part I was involved with - to raise some cash. I
had the option of following the work to Loughborough, but chose not to. It was
good while it lasted but I'd already spoken with Redgate by this point, and
they offered me a software engineering role starting in July 2004.

This was one of only two pay cuts in my career (both of which have been
contract -> permie transitions), but I liked them and what they were doing, so
I took the job, and I stayed there nearly 10 years (that was _never_ the plan,
I might add - I'd only intended to stay for 2 or 3).

And that's how I rode out the dotcom crash: overall I'd say I was incredibly
fortunate. It set me back, but it didn't floor me. Financially things were
quite hard at times, particularly when I first moved to Cambridge, and
particularly when I bought my first house a few years after that. I was lucky
enough that for the most part my salary went up, but it was never like I was
earning outrageous money, and certainly not compared to what I would have had
I graduated in, say, 1997, and found work in the City before the crash when
everybody was just desperate for developers (which I could have done had I
made different choices - long, boring story).

Still, I've always been in work, except when I've chosen not to be myself,
which is a very privileged position to be in.

------
AiApotheosis
I was working at a large firm (similar to HP), a the changes were gradual, but
significant:

\- Hubris blow-back: Non-managers with access to HR data within my own
organization would query payroll data, and publicly say developers are
overpaid. This was a US public firm, not a start-up, and our pay wasn't market
leading.

\- Domestic hiring froze. Existing offers were rescinded. No new offers made.

\- Foreign hiring or visa workers started: The internet wasn't fast enough for
outsourcing at first, so new developers were brought to the US Visa from
India, getting paid quite a bit less, and living 5-6 guys to an apartment in
the woods of New England.

\- Terminations/layoffs: The first was a shock, then came the drain of twice a
year, every year, eventually becoming the norm. At first, the less technically
apt were release (those who learned to program because it was hiring.) Then
some really good people, with good ideas and great degrees gone because they
couldn't put in the hours or work in the environment, or because they couldn't
set aside their pet project.

\- Cost management, control, and reduction, everywhere. Need email? billed to
your department. Need storage? billed by the MB. Need licensed software?
Assemble a business case for a VP, and expect to have 4 tiers of reviews
before that. Need a monitor or memory? Buy it yourself, that will never get
approved. Have a shadow-IT lab where all your work gets done? Expect auditors
to shut it down and claim the assets for the CIO. The correct department
expense number is $0.

\- Project control: strict waterfall, with systems engineering of everything.
Regular metrics reporting with remediation plans to executives. This
requires...

\- Personnel tracking: hours worked per week were introduced, starting at
1900/year, then ratcheting up. 40 per week became 44, and then it was a
whisper. Managers knew, plan your top people at 50-65/week or you would blow
your budget. Those top-billers brought in revenue.

\- Technical advancement evaporated. Development was for the outsourced teams;
if you want to move up, learn how to manage lots of outsourced developers as a
"project manager."

\- Projects shifted. Latitude to explore new technologies and possibilities
went away. Remaining client projects were purely driven by what was needed to
keep businesses moving forward, like legal/regulatory requirements.

\- Governance. To make sure there's consistency, and no shadow projects,
control them through review boards for everything.

Consequences?

It became a grind. The long hours worked during the dot-com era exploring the
possible and creating an internet that never existed before became long hours
to meet project targets, billable targets, and client deadlines.....

Marriages suffered. People skipped family events for work. People skipped
exams or even dropped out of advanced degrees, for work. You could see who was
burned out, or was having trouble with depression, or was self medicating in
other ways.

Professional lives suffered.

Not a good time.

------
csixty4
I graduated with an associate's degree in Chicago in 1999 and went looking for
a job right away. My skillset was mostly C/C++, but I was struggling to get
responses to any of the resumes I faxed out. The crash was still over the
horizon, but I think my lack of experience and lowly AS degree kept a lot of
doors closed. The Midwest wasn't like the Valley in that respect.

I finally took a job with a company whose flagship product was a browser front
end over a 30 year old Pick database. They hired almost anyone off the street
and gave them a two week training course before turning them loose in client
code (customizations to the flagship application). They were literally
training new hires to program, and I was kind of at a disadvantage because I
knew what I was doing and got things done quickly, which is a liability when
you bill by the hour.

The twenty year old company re-branded to a dot com and was planning an IPO.
We got new business cards and letterhead with the new name and everything.
Then the owners saw the writing on the wall. They silently dropped their IPO
plans and we got new business cards with the same new name except no ".com" at
the end.

With only an associate's degree and with my only professional experience being
an outdated database system + programming language, all recruiters wanted to
talk to me about was roles with this same outdated system that was apparently
running in places all over the world. If I wanted to hitch my wagon to a dying
platform, I had a place in France begging for someone like me to one work on
site for a couple months.

Even those calls stopped when the bubble burst. I took another job on that
outdated platform that paid better and kept sending out resumes. Things
eventually got better, but I still couldn't find a role outside Pick systems.

It wasn't until I spent my own cash on a Java certification AND the market
improved that I started getting calls again. But then I faced a different
challenge, because my Java experience was the wrong KIND. I had worked with
Oracle Application Server and their suite, not Websphere or Weblogic. I
understand now that a lot of that strict filtering was to prove that nobody
local had the skills that offshore developers had. Yep, the early 2000s was
all about offshoring!

It's my opinion that starting my career in that time and place set my career
back at least five years. That experience is irrelevant now, thankfully, and
I'm in a pretty good spot these days managing a devops team.

I don't want to be all "you kids don't know how easy you have it", but it's so
easy today to spin up a web application, host it for practically free, and
maybe make a business out of it. I would have to fax over code samples, and
now you have recruiters and hiring managers cruising GitHub profiles looking
for coders to reach out to.

I do worry about the possibility of another bubble. I'd probably be fine, even
if I had to do something outside tech for a while. But for young folks outside
SV things could get pretty hairy again.

------
taude
This is how the first dot-com ended for me, including a few jobs prior,
because I feel the setup is important.

I out of college I started a company with some friends from high-school,
worked that for 6 months, but wasn't making any money, so I got a job at
Microsoft in Redmond, WA. I worked there for over a year, but hated suburbia
(back then Seattle didn't have many people who lived downtown, and pre-
restaurant scene, etc, so I left for a good consulting job on the east coast
and proceeded to spend the next 1.5 years traveling a lot, mostly to Chicago,
but some NY. It was a fun lifestyle for a young hot-shot C++ guy. Then one of
my co-workers quit to start a Startup and I was employee number 4 or so. Back
then the stock market was starting to go wild. We competed against (and valued
our company) like one called Vertical Net [1], we were exuberant and cocky. My
friends were at companies like SilkNet, which got acquired Kana, all my social
circle (25 to 26 year oldish) were involved with high-flying startups and we
thought we were all going to be so rich. We even started playing the options
market, one of our favorites was Nokia and Yahoo options trades. One of my co-
workers made so much trading options in a week, that he cashed out and went
and bought an Audi S4. We were all making fun of him (but the joke was on
those of us who continued to play).

Anyway, after a year at that startup, I moved to another high-flying one
across the river in Cambridge, MA. I only a contractor at this one, but the
money was insane (it's actually taken me about 15 years to get back to the
same money I was making there). Anyway, I think it was November 2000, we
suddenly had some lay-offs announced. They didn't get rid of us right away,
though, they kept the contractors o until the end of the year. But no biggie,
I found another job immediately for a company called ATG. I was going to start
at ATG [2] in February 2001 as a sales engineer. So, in the meantime, I took
off for Europe for six weeks. And proceeded to have the time of my life,
looking forward to my next job. At one point in Paris, I almost bought a
Picasso "sketching" for like 10K US, but instead settled for a more modest
$700 artist by a Japanese etcher that I liked way more. The next part of the
trip, I blew out my ACL skiing in Chamonoix, and then headed back to the US to
await starting my new job.

So, about two days before I was supposed to start the job, I got a call from
ATG that they're having lay-offs and that I'm not to show up for work on the
following Monday. Crap. No, biggie, I've always found tons of work. So, I put
my feeler's out, and even contacted places that had made me offers in December
2000, but no go. Hiring freezes everywhere.

In June, I finally found some contract work at Staples.Com where I worked for
about 6 months. 9/11 happened in September, and by December I was no longer at
Staples.Com.

I couldn't find work for about 8 months after that. And then I ended up
working for the State of MA in the Department of Revenue working on software
for collecting child support in the Fall of 2002. I had gone from a high-
flying C++ coder making $90/hour+ down to making $33/hour (working with Visual
Basic and ASP). Then about two months into the DOR job, the recruiting company
called and said they could only pay me $22/hour.

I didn't really get back on my feet fully until I started another job in
January 2004 at another consulting company (now as a Java/C# engineer), and it
was still for about half of what I made during the dot-com boom. And then from
there I slowly crawled my career back.

In the meantime, most of my friends went back to school, because attorneys,
eye-doctors (New England College of Optometry), one became a psychologist, the
ones who stayed in tech moved into sales-side. There's only two of us who are
still practicing engineers (and I'm 90% on the management side this days).

It was a long road back for me, but I always loved technology. Part of that
road back was writing and publishing with Wiley a tech book, doing some more
consulting, starting a couple businesses, failing a couple businesses, going
through a nasty acquisition, and then finding a dream job again.

If you've read this far, I'll sum it with a couple of fun antidotes: remember
that company I started with friends out of college? They sold a couple years
later to Amazon for about $30M. Remember the guy who bought the Audi S4 with
the options profits? The rest of us eventually pissed all our profits away in
poor trades as the market was collapsing. He at least got an S4 out of it :).
I still have some regrets about leaving Microsoft, I was working on an awesome
team there, and financially (if I could have survived the moral of the Balmer
days), I'd have been way better off (and I doubt I would be been cut during
the grim times). But I've had a lot of good times with my travels and seen a
lot more of the world because I left that job.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VerticalNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VerticalNet)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Technology_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Technology_Group)

~~~
taude
I finally read some more of the stories around here. It's great to see others
with similar stories.

I'd say, I don't think a recession will be so bad for the engineers this time
around. Afterall, there's a ton of outsourcing to other countries that happens
these days, and a lot of companies seem to have thin engineering teams in the
states. I know there's big-tech where this isn't necessarily the case, but I
already think that companies and their engineering budgets are much more
modest compared to the old days. Also, with the few exceptions for those
crushing it on stock options in big tech, I think salaries are a lot lower
over all in software engineering, even 18 years later.

------
tluyben2
I had a little software dev company which sold software components; I made a
little website which detailed the components (think of things like news,
forum, chat, calendar, contacts, etcetc) and put that online in 1999 (I was
writing desktop software and cgi e-commerce for many years by then). I got
phone calls (email was on their too but...) very fast which resulted in a
large investmenr and a fusion between my small company and one of the more
successful web companies in the region (they had a fax machine (yup...)
spouting out RFPs all day) but could not deliver as they built everything from
scratch; components sped up their work a lot. It also resulted in clients
around the world so my bargaining position in that fusion was solid. Ofcourse
most clients were startups with investment money, hardly any or incapable
people and no real plan. Visiting clients was usually more of a party; limos,
booze and food all day, hardly any work. One of our largest clients at the
time had everyone partying 3 days and then we did ‘some work’.

As devs we had a really easy compared to now; expectations were low and
getting anything working was enough to satisfy their investors. We knocked out
things fast with a small team but a large difference before and after at that
time was that before actually no-one tested or even looked at everything; they
were happy spending the money. Salaries for devs were high and we were
rockstars no matter the quality or performance.

When the crash came, most projects for startups instantly halted. Sometimes
literally from 1 day to another we got letters from lawyers that their clients
were filing for bankruptcy. Meaning a lot of ongoing work was unpaid (not a
lot; our CEO did not tolerate late payment, but payment comes after the work,
per month, so their were gaps).

The owner of our office (we had 2 floors, they had the rest) went bankrupt a
few weeks in so we had to move. All offices around us became empty over the
next weeks to months; almost every building was for hire the next year.

I had a lot of dev friends who lost their jobs at startups overnight and who
all (I cannot think of any who did not) moved to big corps (not necessarily
tech) and have not moved since.

We luckily, because of the worldwide components sales, had attracted some
large clients (insurers, banks, unions, political parties) so we were not hit
so hard; we had one of our best years 1 year after. We now had the opportunity
to pick up very good devs and we did.

The fallout was that we did not acquire new clients for a few years and lived
on the current clients (risky but better than the alternative of no clients).

Another thing we really noticed was that people after were really counting
money and so they started to really push for performance and quality which put
strain on us devs until we figured out how to cope with that (we never had to
before).

A lot of devs I know could not find jobs until a couple of years later;
companies hired way too many people. The big consultancy outfits at the end of
the 90s started hiring and training non-stem grads as devs for instance. They
hired whoever wanted to program to satisfy demand; the layoffs were massive.
After the crash they noticed they did better work with vastly less people as
well; the low focus on quality before the crash made many people kind of
perform minimally.

There is some economic downturn coming soonish which always has consequences
for jobs etc, but I cannot see it going the same way as it did then. Devs are
already ‘applied optimally’ (worked to death) in many places so after the
crash they cannot work harder as we were forced to then (financials went down,
quality demands went up) but I do think, now that so many people are devs and
companies are hiring whatever they can get, globally, that will cause a
massive amount of layoffs and probably lower salaries for a while. Good, all
round devs with communication skills won’t have issues, nor will talented
beginners, but a lot of others will probably be axed.

The 2001 crash did do little in the long run; companies are still invested
stupid amounts (far larger than at the time) into for bad/infeasible ideas and
companies are again hiring whoever and training them. So mid to longterm (5
years) there is nothing to fear, short-term, depending on what and where you
work and how good (and lucky etc) you are, you might get a few years off.

I found though that right after both crashes (2001,2008), it was a good time
to create a startup; resources are cheap (people, offices, 2nd hand hardware
(we bought a lot of servers and laptops of bankruptcy auctions for next to
nothing) etc) so there is silver lining no matter what happens. Make sure to
save money though.

The biggest issues were with friends who recently picked up ‘html programming’
and who worked in a (bad) startup and recently had a (too high; money was
forever in the boom!) mortgage and kids right before the crash and suddenly
everything collapsed. Luckily in my country you won’t die, but they usually
had to sell.

------
reuven
I started my own consulting business in 1995. I've thus been through two
recessions -- in 2000, and then in 2008.

In 2000, I had just hired five people to work for me, as I expanded my Web
consulting agency. For about a year, we had lots of work, from clients all
over the world. The phone was ringing off the hook. We were making money. I
was learning how to sell work done by other people, not just by myself.

And then the bottom dropped out.

It was very difficult, since I had to pay salaries, office rent, and the like.
I was scared. I was upset. I even worried that the debts would force my family
to lose our house. (We didn't actually come close to that, but I did worry
about it.)

I mean, when I started my own business, I figured that if things didn't work
out, I could always get a "real" job, at a real company. But now I was on the
hook for other people's salaries.

I ended up firing everyone, and taking no salary for several months. I had
enough work for myself, most of the time, and much of that money went toward
paying back the bank's line of credit, as well as (to some degree) paying my
own salary.

As a result, I promised myself (and my wife) never to have full-time employees
again. I did have a bunch of employees whom I hired on an hourly basis, giving
them a generous proportion of whatever money they brought in . (Too generous,
my accountant consistently told me.) This meant that in bad times, I wasn't on
the hook for their salaries. I should note that this arrangement wasn't for
everyone -- but I was very straight about it with potential hires, and also
told them that it was completely OK for them to be doing other jobs while
working for me.

So yeah, this recession really hurt. And it made me much more cautious. There
were months when I had literally no work, but that was pretty rare -- again, I
was generally able to get enough work for myself to get by. But I was putting
out feelers _everywhere_ , looking for whatever development projects I could
find.

Fast forward a few years, to recession #2. We were living in Chicago, where I
was finishing the coursework and initial research for my PhD. I would walk
with my eldest child to her kindergarten, and we would see a growing number of
homes for sale. Moreover, we saw that they were for sale for a _long_ time. We
had a very clear view of the US housing market turning sour, but it wasn't
clear at that point that things were going to be as bad as they were.

We moved back to Israel in the summer of 2008, and it was immediately clear
that things were bad, and getting worse. Lots of high-tech companies were
laying people off. I was worried that I would get swept up in this, and not be
able to find work. And indeed, it was hard (but not impossible) to find
projects.

The good news was that I had enough of an established reputation by this point
that I managed to find projects. Again, I wasn't filling my calendar 100%, but
it was about 75% full, which was much better than other people. I also got
into training more heavily, and that turned out not only to fill my calendar
pretty consistently, but also showed me how much I enjoyed training and
could/should specialize in it.

One of my worries was that lots of people would get laid off, and then start
their own consulting businesses, competing with me. My accountant laughed when
I said this, telling me that most people who have full-time jobs done then
want to go into business for themselves. And he was right.

I do expect a recession -- or if nothing else, a slowdown -- in the coming
year, and I'm starting to prepare myself for it. I'm now doing training in
Python and data science, and constantly reach out to companies to find out if
they're interested in such things. But I also have a large (14k subscriber)
free, weekly newsletter about Python that gets my name out. And I'm selling a
growing number of online courses to individuals, which will (I expect) cushion
any problems I might have with my in-person corporate training.

But each recession is different, and teaches us different lessons -- so I'm
hoping that my previous experience will be helpful, but I'm sure that I'll
discover all sorts of new problems as the coming year unfolds.

------
codevark
Around 1992, my friend and I started doing desktop database apps as a side gig
while we worked at a consulting firm doing IT. We decided to do this full
time. With connections in the music industry, we started doing websites and
online stores for some big names like Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Phish, and
others. By then there were about 5-6 of us, working out of my friend's house.
We weren't real employees, and only got paid when my friend walked into the
room and started handing out $50 bills. Our online stores morphed into an
award-winning product for small and medium-sized merchants, that you could
pick up for $19.99 at Staples, CompUSA, etc. In 1996 we incorporated, and I
was hired as the first official employee/lead programmer. I think I was making
about $50K by then; we had grown and moved into a real office. A couple of
years later, we had the first single-shopping-cart online mall. I was making
$85K. We had almost 70 employees. In 2000, a Canadian company bought us for
$45M and I was given another raise to almost $110K, but then things fell apart
quickly. The last 6-8 months I was basically paid to drink coffee and sit
around. By 2001 we were kaput. My 60,000 stock options, when I could finally
do anything with them were worth about $1200, down from an initial value of
~1.8M CAD. I had bought a truck, and had put a downpayment on my house, but
that was about it. I flailed around for a few years looking for programming
work, and then got the job I have now, doing IT at a local University. I'm
making about $50K again :/ It was a lot of work, with (mostly) great people,
and for a while we were on top of the world. In some ways you could say we
were Amazon before Amazon. If we hadn't gone under, Amazon probably would have
bought us. Perchance to dream..

~~~
why_only_15
Why don't you try to get more high paying work?

