
Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash? - MalcolmDiggs
With all the talk of us being in a bubble lately, I&#x27;ve been wondering:<p>What was it like for developers when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000&#x27;s? I didn&#x27;t start coding until after that, so the job-market I&#x27;ve always experienced has been one of ever-increasing demand. How different was it then? And how did you make it through?<p>What were job-prospects like? How were your wages affected? Did recruiters simply cease to exist? More to the point, what advice do you have for developers who want to be well-insulated if&#x2F;when the next crash happens?<p>Thanks a bunch
======
bdcravens
A lot of shaking off of weak developers. I don't say that to insult the very
talented developers during that time who couldn't stay employed. Rather, they
suffered along with the rest, due to way too much supply. Developers who knew
one language who could get hired merely by having a word or two on their
resume and having a pulse; when things dried up, everyone who should have been
an entry level sales person were all clammering to get the jobs and money they
were used to, but it was a buyer's market at that point.

You made it through by being versatile. Not by starting to learn while you
were job hunting, but being prepared when jobs were aplenty.

You had to be ready to be employed in a non-VC funded world, doing boring
things.

I liken it to today, where you have an abundance of 6-week boot camps and
developers writing code against the sexy Javascript framework du jour. Those
developers will starve if we hit another period where VC dries up.

Learn some boring stuff, even stuff that gets laughed at on HN. .NET. Java. In
places like Houston, there's TONS of jobs, but they're not in Rails or Clojure
or Angular. They're in .NET, writing apps for big oil or healthcare.

Though it wasn't as big then, I think learning dev-ops will really take
someone far when no one's writing Twitter aggregators or social networks for
quadcopters.

tl;dr When times are lean, boring languages in boring companies that make
real, not VC, money is how you stay afloat

~~~
Ologn
I agree. I went from dot-com Unix admin to investment bank Unix admin in 2000.
Luckily it was via a consulting company. They said my interview process was
unusual, because every internal interviewer passed on me, while every
interviewer from a dot-com gave me a strong recommend. I was interviewed by
them many, many times and finally accepted.

It was very different. At the dot-com's that I was at, web servers and
application servers were Red Hat Linux, and only the databases were Sun boxes,
with E4500 being a high end box. At a post-IPO dot-com there might be one
E6500 and maybe a few Sun E4500's, and lots of Red Hat machines. At the
investment bank they were all Solaris on the Unix side, and had dozens of
E6500's in my city, and hundreds of E4500's. The investment bank had admins in
the OpenBoot PROM all the time, whereas I had barely been in it. The
investment bank was always replacing disks in the hundreds of external RAID
arrays they had whereas only our database had a large external RAID array.
They used NFS extensively and you had to know it thoroughly. My knowledge
about Red Hat Linux, Apache web servers, Java application servers etc. didn't
amount to much.

It was qualitatively (and quantitatively) very different, and in interviews it
sounded like I didn't know what I was talking about.

On the developer side, the bureaucracy is very different. If a minor change in
a software package is being pushed to New York, London and Tokyo, which often
it is, you might have five meetings about it, and the code push might take
weeks or even months. No matter how trivial the change. Three different
divisions might have to sign off on the change. It's definitely not an agile
code process, with code going from your fingers to the production web/app
within the week.

~~~
DonHopkins
I must ask: What were investment bank admins doing in the OpenBoot PROM (aka
Open Firmware), exactly? Hacking FORTH, using Emacs on the keys, and then
saving it in NVRAM?

Did you know that Open Firmware has its own theme song?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060111132138/http://playground...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060111132138/http://playground.sun.com/1275/misc/ofwsong.au)

[http://everything2.com/title/The+Open+Firmware+Song](http://everything2.com/title/The+Open+Firmware+Song)

Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones"

    
    
        Firmware
        Open Firmware
        It's the appropriate technology,
        Features
        FCode booting
        Hierarchical DevInfo tree. 
    
        Hack Forth
        Using Emacs on the keys,
        Save in
        NVRAM if you please.
        With your
        Open Firmware
        You can fix the bugs in no time
        Bring the kernel up in no time
        We'll have an FCode time!
    

I hacked FORTH with Mitch Bradley, the father of Open Firmware, as a summer
intern at Sun in 1987. I love OpenBoot PROM, and his 32 bit 68k/SPARC Sun
FORTH system that it's based on, which was derived from Langston and Perry's
Forth-83! He also developed a version of it used in the OLPC XO-1.
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware)

~~~
Ologn
Cool.

For production slated machines, we were usually running commands such as
"copy-clock-tod-to-io-board", nothing too creative.

While I was there, the Sparcstation 20's reached end-of-life and we were
allowed to bring one home (I still have it). At home I had gotten ADSL through
a reseller that had an odd routing setup - they wanted the MAC address of my
desktop so that they could assign an IP to it. I guess I should have gotten a
hub that could do NAT, but I gave them my Intel PC MAC, and then went into the
SS20 OBP and changed the MAC address to that of my PC. It worked too, both
machines got ADSL. Actually what I wound up doing is doing NAT with the SS20,
after I swapped out the PC ethernet card with a spare one lying around.

~~~
DonHopkins
If you're wondering how it works, it's self documenting: besides the usual
"help", it also has a decompiler/disassembler built in: "see", which you use
as a prefix before other words, like "see see" to decompile the decompiler!

------
kevinastone
I graduated in the summer of 2001 (BS ECE). Many of my classmates had their
already accepted job offers rescinded before graduation. I ended up working a
non-degree job for a year before finding an internship that I worked into a
full-time position. Finally found a more permanent career in 2004 when I was
hired into an aerospace company (where most of the jobs were).

Keep in mind, besides the dot-com crash and then the sept 11th attacks, the
real macro environment of the early 2000s was outsourcing. Everybody believed
you could just hire a team in India or Russia for pennies on the dollar. It
would take another 5+ years for that trend to reverse as companies recognized
the challenges in moving their development resources off-shore.

As I stated, I responded to the off-shore movement by switching to a less-
affected industry (aerospace/defense). Most "market corrections" really affect
the most vulnerable segments of the job market: entry-level and near-
retirement.

~~~
champion
Similar, I graduated with a BS in CS in 2001. I was lucky to have finished my
job search in the Fall of 2000. The market had still been hot in the fall, I
received several (4-5?) offers for 60-75k (boston/nyc). Each seemed like they
were on the "new, exciting" project at a company where their revenue came from
elsewhere. I took a job with a company I'd interned at.

By the Spring things had definitely changed. First lots of hiring freezes and
then offers to friends rescinded. (A few lucky ones got paid 50% to take a
year off.) I think most of the offers I had were for projects that were likely
killed since they didn't add anything to the top line. The did a round of
layoffs where I was joining in the spring before I started. I remember
anxiously waiting at my college apt to find out if I was unlucky. I wasn't
affected, I believe primarily because I was "cheap" compared to the people
making 2x or more than me they chose to let go.

I felt very fortunate to land on an interesting team doing real product
development; others I know who graduated in 2002 had no option but the longer
path through customer support / non-tech jobs for a little bit.

~~~
waps
I finished school in end of 2000, when things were crashing. I only finished
school that late because of thesis (didn't get through on first try). I had to
compare my wage to lots of people who got hired 2-3 years earlier (which could
have been me, of course, if I hadn't pursued an extra degree).

Not starting work in 1998, I've calculated, cost me me somewhere north of
$250k in wages (over three years, this is Europe I'm talking about). It would
have been exhausting but the company that hired me in 2000 would have hired me
in 1998 and allowed me to work on my thesis on the side, and of course $250k
would easily pay for a year's sabbatical afterward. Even better scenario would
have been work until 2001, get fired with severance (usually not optional in
Europe), then finish degree, miss the worst of the downturn.

Very frustrating to work among people who make double or triple you do just
because of the time they were hired (this was a consultancy firm, more than
relatively basic development skills were not required, or usually not even
wanted). Very frustrating to come to the realization I finished my education
at pretty much the worst time in 2 decades, and just how big the difference
was with a more optimal choice of when to study.

Oh well, maybe the people in this thread are right, and I'll get the chance to
get another (related) degree. Or maybe going for a full phd. I am planning to
do that sometime in the future, definitely, I guess maybe it'll be next year.

------
canterburry
The only people in demand was anyone with 10+ years experience. Job
requirements got ridiculous and if you needed any kind of visa sponsorship you
could just forget about it regardless of experience.

If you didn't have every single acronym in the job req and 5+ years of
experience with each, the employers simply were not interested. Things like,
you'd used Eclipse but not IntelliJ disqualified you because IntelliJ was
requested. Some job reqs even requested more years of experience in some
technology which had only been around for half the time mentioned.

Sending 100+ resumes a week without any callbacks became the norm. Recruiters
could simply sit back and wait for the resumes to come to them. If you weren't
actively looking, no one would call you.

Enterprise market was essentially the only game in town. Any kind of web dev
just died overnight. I managed to start and finish a masters degree before
things got better again.

~~~
csixty4
> Things like, you'd used Eclipse but not IntelliJ disqualified you because
> IntelliJ was requested.

For me, it was Websphere or Weblogic. I had worked with Oracle's enterprise
Java stack & plain old J2EE. One interviewer asked me why I was even brought
in for an interview.

~~~
nsxwolf
Thank you for reminding me of one of my most favorite job postings from the
era.

I remember one that said "Websphere only. Don't even think about applying if
you've used Weblogic!"

Some of all of it was in caps.

------
tunesmith
I was in Portland at the time and it was bad. I got laid off, was lucky enough
to find another job at 80k, and then was laid off again ten days before 9/11\.
The recruiters I was working with all slowly became unemployed. Once I had an
opportunity to interview from a recruiter on behalf of one of either Intel or
Nike, and the rate they quoted me (for perl/php programming) was $12/hour. (I
declined the interview.)

After a couple of months, I started cold-calling businesses as a
consultant/freelancer - got my first gig at $20/hour, and then a more
reasonable one at $55/hour, since then I've been passed around via word of
mouth. I found that clients were more amenable to contracts than FTE because
they all needed work "for now" but were petrified of commitment since they had
no idea what the future would be like. Anyway, I stuck with freelancing and
have never since taken a salaried job.

Basic advice - don't sacrifice your salary for stock options (unless you're a
founder and already have enough emergency fund saved up to last you through
another crash). Don't trust your "like a family" employer to take care of you,
don't believe that HR has your best interests at heart. You're in business for
you, not your employer - treat them well in exchange for them treating you
fairly, but not out of some misplaced sense of "loyalty". The rest of it is
just, save up and live simply - programmers aren't investment bankers.

------
snorkel
We had to get adjusted to not being treated like a rock stars just for knowing
unix. We stopped chanting IPO, IPO. We learned the stock market is
disconnected from reality. Took a hit in salary, but nobody starved that I
recall. Looking back on it, it was if we hit the lottery but we were too young
to realize that this isn't a normal economy we were living in. But c'est la
vie, change is opportunity and all that. Just keep your skill set relevant and
keep switching jobs until you land a gig working on something that is
interesting with people you enjoy being with, and don't expect to get rich,
but if you work hard you just might anyway.

~~~
OceanPowers
this, so much.

------
poulsbohemian
I graduated in 2000 with several years experience. First gig out of school
resulted in huge layoffs but I was paying attention and had already been
looking, plus was still young (read: cheap) so didn't have any problems
finding something. People who graduated the next two years after me though who
hadn't really hustled to build up their resumes ended up leaving tech
altogether because they couldn't get hired - and this was in a tech hub
(Seattle). It was 2005 before it because "easy" to get hired again and I
started to see new grads reenter the market. Even in the 2004-2006 timeframe
salaries were pretty stagnate with the exception of places like amazon.com
which seemed to be shoveling money at as many people as they could hire.

One of the big challenges was that large companies were the only place to get
hired - the few startups that were around were often zombies leftover from the
dot-com times; it was clear they weren't going anyplace, and (perhaps
exaggerating slightly here...) nobody was starting anything new. Keep in mind
though a lot has changed in 15 years - it took a lot more capital for
infrastructure in those days so there were fewer companies starting up anyway.

For people my age and older... we saw the pre-dot-com slowness of the early
90s, we got caught in the dot-com downturn, we got caught again in the post
9/11 downturn, then we saw our house values melt down in 2008... so as far as
I'm concerned, in good times be painfully frugal and stash cash because the
bad times are just around the corner...

~~~
sirmarksalot
Your read on the 2001-2002 graduates matches my experience exactly. I
graduated in 2002 and didn't get back into the industry until 2006. I remember
Real Networks was one of the big companies everyone wanted to work for, even
though nobody liked them.

I remember a friend getting me an interview at a finance company specializing
in the growing subprime mortgage market. In hindsight, I'm glad that one
didn't pan out.

------
Animats
SFgirl.com had the best coverage of this, with their "pink slip parties". The
remnants of the site are at
"[http://www.sfgirl.com/about_us.html"](http://www.sfgirl.com/about_us.html"),
but almost all the links are dead. A few that are still live:

[http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Think-Pink-Slip-
Layoff...](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Think-Pink-Slip-Layoff-
parties-to-come-to-2945029.php)

[http://www.forbes.com/2000/11/29/1129pinkslip.html](http://www.forbes.com/2000/11/29/1129pinkslip.html)

About 40% of the twenty-somethings in SF moved out. SF itself was so dead that
one day, at rush hour, I saw a completely empty street in downtown. I asked a
cop if something was stopping traffic, and he said no, it had been like that
for a few days. Many empty buildings in SOMA.

I had an automatic system predicting the death dates of publicly held dot-
coms, based on their assets and cash flow. I keep it up for reference:

[http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html](http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html)

(Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", that means the
company is so dead.)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
That site name wouldn't happen to have been inspired by "Upside" magazine,
would it :-)

------
santacluster
For anyone with actual skill, nothing really changed. But then again, for
people with actual skill nothing has really changed throughout the last 25
years, despite the crisis.

Yes, there was a huge market through Y2K and the dot-com bubble for people who
knew how to operate a keyboard, and that market collapsed. But those people
where as much developers as I am a surgeon because I know how to apply a band-
aid. Personally I was glad the bubble burst, because it became increasingly
harder to avoid landing in a place where most of the "developers" weren't
utterly incompetent.

HN isn't a representative audience though. Most of those people wouldn't be on
the early 2000's equivalents of HN either. If this is a bubble and it bursts,
most of HN-ers that get affected won't be out of work for more than a month.

Many may have to take a boring enterprise gig, but that's pretty much how the
second wave of internet-companies started: bored and with time on their hands,
many hackers started to work on what was then called "social software"
projects, which eventually resulted in a wave of social media startups.

Things may be different in SV, especially when it comes to the balance of
wages vs cost of living, but SV is an outlier.

~~~
philovivero
This, this, and more this.

------
fecak
I started recruiting for startups around Philadelphia in 1998. For the first
couple years anyone who could spell Java would get significant raises to leave
big companies in the area for funded startup scene. Signing bonuses were given
to most hires, and stock options were valued highly by most hires.

When the crash happened, I started to get calls from developers who wouldn't
take my calls a year earlier. Many had a few jobs within a short period of
time. I remember placing one guy three times in two years due to closings.

Many recruiters couldn't generate enough revenue and subsequently left the
market, which was actually a good thing because the market had become flooded
and needed a purging. Salaries came down a bit, but candidates at this point
would put very little value on stock options. Options went from being looked
at as a large piece of the package to being considered the equivalent of
lottery tickets.

To be insulated, I'd encourage you to try to become 'known' in your space.
Those with solid reputations and networks were always employed, even if they
bounced around a bit.

------
poulsbohemian
There were three interesting groups that came out of that time. One was the
CEO/CIO/CTO's of startups who found themselves barely qualified for entry-
level roles when the bubble burst. It was a sad awakening for them. Another
group were mid-career types who found their careers and salaries put on hold
for 5+ years while the market improved. That was sad because many were very
talented but with no place to apply it; some never really getting their shot
again. The third were those who would have otherwise been starting businesses,
but the times just weren't right so they put their heads down working in
boring jobs waiting for their moment.

~~~
supahfly_remix
That's a good summary. I'd like to add a fourth group of which I was a part:
people who were trying out startups but weren't entrepreneurial. We went back
to being employees for mid-size/larger companies.

------
digisth
In addition to many of the previous posters' comments, I'd add that the number
of job offers per week went from a flood (10+ a week, sometimes double that)
to zero during the bust. Acquaintances, former co-workers, and myself all took
huge pay cuts and the jobs that were available weren't terribly exciting for a
spell. Outsourcing and offshoring were the watchwords; in-house custom
development was laughed at in many places.

This boom is honestly (IMO) 1) more stable, as many companies actually do have
business models and revenue and 2) more exciting (technology stacks are more
interesting, tools have improved by leaps and bounds, very interesting
companies are popping up.)

My advice is to be constantly learning (both theory and practice); watch
trends and become familiar with where they are going (if an exciting new
technology comes along, learn some of the basics, even if that's just a "hello
world" equivalent - I don't recommend doing a deep dive of anything truly new
unless it really blows your mind or you think it's going to become lucrative);
try to generalize your skillset a bit - there's a tradeoff here of course, as
specialists will often get paid more while the getting is good - but it means
you'll never lack for work (and may get stuck with some more drudgery since
you're the jack-of-all-trades, master of none.) I'd also recommend trying to
get multiple income streams going, whether that's from your own services
business, freelancing, or just software-related consulting, so that if/when
the crash comes, you've already got your own personal safety net.

------
mkozlows
Depends on where you were. If you were in San Francisco, I can't speak to it;
but if you were in your standard middle American city, it was fine. I
graduated with a CS degree in 1999. In 2000, I got a job doing Java dev with
no Java experience on my resume, and a 20% raise from my previous job. Later
in 2000, I got a job doing Java/Perl (with both on my resume) and another 15%
raise. In 2001, I got a Java job and 10% raise. And then in 2002, I got a .NET
job (with two weeks of .NET experience) and a 25% raise.

The main downside was that smaller companies kept going out of business (which
is why I had so many jobs in that time period -- two of those companies
disappeared entirely, one of them taking a month's worth of salary with it,
which super-sucked).

A key thing, though, is that lots of really, really, really marginal
developers got hired in the late '90s -- I worked with some of those at the
first company that went out of business -- and they very possibly never got a
job in the industry again. Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just
as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically
write code.

~~~
sirmarksalot
> Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire
> any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code.

I think they also took it as an excuse to suck even more at interviewing.
Since the pile of applicants was practically endless, you could reject people
for any damn reason, and nobody would call you on it. At one point somebody
was telling me that their standard interview question was "draw me a house."
And if they picked up the pen without asking follow-up questions, that was a
no-hire. I think that was also around the time the manhole-cover questions
started taking off.

~~~
Agathos
"Draw me a house," with the gotcha if you don't ask questions, is described by
Fred Moody in I Sing the Body Electronic. That's early 90s Microsoft.

~~~
sirmarksalot
Interesting. While I understand the reasoning behind it, I just don't see how
it would actually predict how the candidate would behave in the actual job. It
seems more likely to divide candidates into a) people who thought this was
setup for a bigger question, and b) people who'd been coached on this sort of
thing.

------
pm24601
Scary.

I basically learned something I thought I knew - debt is bad. Really bad. We
survived but it was only because we clamped down super hard and interest rates
dropped.

When times are good, cut your debt so you owe nothing. Get some savings but
once you have some savings pay off the debt.

I knew lots of people who were still employeed but were freaking out because
the stock market was collapsing and they were overleveraged - they had
borrowed against their home to buy stock.

When April 2000, hit everyone stopped watching their stocks shoot up to
watching their stocks crash - same lack of work getting done but gloomier and
more suicidal.

My advice to you is:

network, network, network - now before you need it.

Something that I find hard to do myself sometimes.

Then again I have been through a bunch of crashes/mini-crashes already.

But in 2000, you could not rent a Uhaul - they were all reserved for people
leaving ahead of you.

Every boom time gets more and more selective here.

Tech is not a long term career move - the ageism will get you if the boom/bust
doesn't. Plan for a life outside of tech if you can.

The froth is happening. I am betting on a crash somewhere around mid 2016.
Stock market is looking frothy with the real economy doing nothing. .... just
like in 1991, 2000, 2008

------
pmarca
Stock incentives became considered worthless, and most people were happy to
have a job.

------
dripton
I had two different employers go bust in 2002.

First one was a startup acquired by a big corporation in 2000, but they gave
up on us a couple years later. How much the larger economic climate affected
that, versus the indisputable fact that we were spending a lot more than we
were making, I don't know.

Got another job before the severance ran out. Second one was a small startup,
which ran out of cash and failed to make payroll a few months later. The
owners wanted to keep going on a shoestring and offered me equity to stay, but
I didn't want to take that gamble. Again, I can't say how much of that was due
to the economy (harder to find investors in 2002 than in 2000), versus the
fact that the company was spending money and not making any.

Got another job right away. This one was a profitable government contractor, I
stayed there for years.

My first piece of advice is to always have current, marketable skills. You
don't have to chase every trend, but you should know more than one thing, just
in case that one thing becomes the next buggy whip.

My second piece of advice is not to put all your eggs into one basket. Salary
is more reliable than equity. Savings will get you through rough times.

------
kartayyar
Changes create new winners and losers.

At the time the crash was just starting to happen, I interviewed at Sun for a
job in the Java compiler group.

Their office was just off the De Anza and 280 exit in Cupertino. They told me
how their neighbor Apple hadn't been doing well,and how they were gradually
taking over all the office space near them. The folks I interviewed with
thought Apple would be history in a few years, and being a hardware company
that was doing well, they would deal with the crash just fine. I believed
them.

Apple made a complete comeback. Sun went through many rounds of layoffs before
it was swallowed by Oracle.

Luckily for me I ended up taking another job at a company that was one of the
few to do relatively well during the crash.

Till this day I am grateful I did not take the Sun offer.

------
brianmcconnell
The best insulation you can have is cash in the bank or be prepared to move.

The next crash probably won't be cyclical in your city. The money will come
back, but it will come back somewhere else.

If your priority is to stay in the city where you're living, be prepared to
make that work (which means being flexible about what you do), or be prepared
to move (which means being flexible about where you live, and being in a
relationship where moving for work is OK).

------
_greim_
I think diversifying your skill set can help protect you against a bubble
burst. I had a reputation for being both a programmer and visual designer and
I think it kept me afloat through the early 2000s.

And by "diversifying your skill set" I don't mean just being proficient in
more than one area, but also being _perceived_ as being proficient in more
than one area. This is probably hard to do without switching jobs. You have to
sell yourself as being "good at both A and B" during the interview and only
then will the perception take root.

Incidentally, this was a double-edged sword for me, since peoples' perception
of me being a designer (I had merely added a couple art samples to my resume)
always seemed to pull my career in a less technical direction than I wanted to
go, partly because I stayed at the same company so long.

------
joeblau
When I went to college in 1999, our guidance counselor told us that for every
student graduating with a Computer Science degree, there were 5 companies
competing to hire them. She said "You have a 500% chance of getting a job with
a Computer Science degree." When I graduated in 2003, 1/3 of my classmates got
a job doing software engineering, 1/3 went back to their job they did before
they got into college (usually some sort of retail), and the final 1/3 went
back to live with their parents and were unemployed.

The only area that was really hiring at the time was the Government, and I
lived on the east coast so I was able to work for a Government contractor a
few months after graduating. It took quite a bit longer for some of my friends
to finally use their degree and some still never have.

------
cothomps
1) I was fortunate enough to be in a good place where my wages were not hit
terribly hard, but there was a big slowdown in wage growth.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an
insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to
'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull
job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking
opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the
outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly
wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being
only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new
graduate.

~~~
cothomps
I'll note that one positive in the industry is that people put some serious
thought into working in a way that was more productive than dot-com crazy and
we all took Agile methodologies seriously.

------
paulsutter
The MBAs went back to wherever they came from. Engineers were suddenly more
interested in the work and the team. No more of those ridiculous parties,
which were never fun anyway. Lots of people took a few months to a year to
travel or relax. People no longer talked about "time famine".

Actually it felt great. Like a return to the basics.

~~~
gauberger
Second that. And with exodus of ~ 1M people, Bay Area traffic got a lot nicer.

~~~
selimthegrim
Have you got a source for that number?

~~~
philovivero
The number may be incorrect, but the improvement in traffic was pretty obvious
to us living in SF at the time.

------
blunte
My experience applies to Dallas/Houston/Boulder, which was probably very
different from Silicon Valley.

Before: * Pay increases of 10-50% each year or two as you changed jobs. *
Finding a job was a matter of sending your resume to 1 or 2 decent recruiters,
then fielding the endless calls about opportunities. * High quality,
challenging technical interviews from senior developers and engineers.

After: * No significant pay increases anymore. * Recruiters that never
answered emails or calls (explained below). * Low quality interviews given by
hiring managers, or in some cases by contractors with little experience of
their own. * H1-B visas bringing in floods of people who largely could not
solve problems and who needed to be given every solution just short of typing
the code.

Prior to dot-com bust, recruiters were professionals who had a fair grasp of
the technologies and industries they were involved in. They seemed to treat
their jobs as actual professions rather than as temporary stepping stones to
something else.

After the bust, companies reigned in their (perhaps overly aggressive) hiring
and IT growth, leading to perhaps an over-abundance of recruiting firms. But
at the same time, new recruiting firms emerged staffed by low (no) quality
keyword-searching resume-pushing monkeys who would work for peanuts. Thus, the
real recruiting firms cut staff so severely that the remaining few were buried
under resumes of all the IT people displaced (let go).

Companies still had positions open, even advertising them, but hiring managers
were very reluctant to actually fill those positions. Despite approvals to
hire, nobody wanted to take the risk of actually spending the money on more
staff.

This led to the growth in low skill H1-B labor, which further reduced the need
for quality recruiters. It all became a game of numbers, a race to the lowest
common denominator.

When that didn't produce positive results for industries, corporate management
(who could count money but could not judge IT quality) made the next obvious
step - offshoring. This further ruined the environment.

Basically there was an 8-10 year dark age in IT (unless perhaps you were in
Silicon Valley... I can't speak for that). It still hasn't recovered fully,
and it probably never will.

~~~
notlisted
I do think there are problems with H1B visas these days... Too many go to big
consulting companies (Infosys, Wipro, Tata, L&T, Satyam), but...

Your post-boom H1B claims are simply not true. The glut of H1B visas were
available and used DURING the boom. For several years after 2000 the cap was
not reached. In 2003 the cap was reduced to 65k (1998 levels). Your
generalized claims about the quality level of H1B workers looks to be
xenophobia (or worse).

In 1999/2000, H1B visas were much less flexible than they are today. People
were beholden to their companies/jobs. Transferring to another job/company
took 5 months. Holders had 10 days to leave the country after losing their
jobs. Out-of-status one wasn't allowed to find a new job.

During the boom, enforcement of those last two things was not always strict,
but afterwards it was. KICKING ALL THOSE PEOPLE OUT CAUSED THE OUTSOURCING
BOOM. A well-educated workforce, familiar with the American corporate
landscape, a business network in America, forced to move back, willing to
apply their skills with the help of cheap local labor.

While ragging on those H1B holders, it is important to realize that THEY
FILLED THE UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL SECURITY COFFERS without ever being allowed
to collect (look up '40 social security credits').

------
DanielBMarkham
The dot-com crash was quite an adventure. Being a coder/PM, I really didn't
realize we were in it until it was already several months in.

I had left one gig and had started looking for the next one. One month I was
getting multiple 6-figure full-time job offers. The next month the phone
didn't ring.

I ended up going back to basics: marketing. I went through the online job
boards and found which skills were still selling, then revised my resume to
focus on those. I made my pitch better and started to talking to recruiters.

It's all still just a numbers game. There's a funnel of jobs you apply for.
The next level is the recruiter interview, then the tech interview. Different
rate quotes get different amounts of volume into the top of the funnel.

I ended up taking a 30% cut from my rate before. That went on for a few
months, then the next job was back at my normal rate. In fact, the more I
worked the market the better my rates got. I took a big hit for the several
months it took to re-tool, but in general within a year or two I was doing as
good or better than before. (The only exception is that the full-time job
calls dried up.)

The rule of thumb here is that multi-skilled contractors can always find work
as long as they have good marketing and sales skills. The guys who had been
camping out at the same job for several years and not growing their skillset
had the worst time of it.

------
x0x0
You all are forgetting FC. Fucked was the front page of the startup scene.
What was the bubble like? Discovering you were laid off by reading it on FC.
Thanks to archive for saving all the content.

Oh, and having a friend who is a very good engineer (ms cs from mit) take a
job for $45k to put a dent in their mortgage.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20010201083400/http://fuckedcomp...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010201083400/http://fuckedcompany.com/)

------
jasonkester
The late '90s were fun.

Money was flying about in all directions and all you needed to do was stick
your hand up and grab some of it. Your silly internet company would get $25
Million for the worst idea you could think of. If you'd read a "For Dummies"
book, you could take your pick of $75/hr contracts or just grab as much
$200/hr freelance work as you felt like. You could stick that surplus money
into the market by picking any stock with an "e" in front of the name and
watch it double in value every few weeks.

Then 2000 happened. And it went back to normal.

Normal.

Not a disaster. Not the end of the world. Just back to regular jobs for
regular companies with regular business plans for regular developer wages. If
you were good at what you did, you were fine. If you were a converted business
major, you went to law school. No sweat.

Everybody (at least everybody I was aware of) saw it coming. We were in a
bubble. Yahoo wasn't going to double a fifth time that year, so it probably
wasn't a good idea to accept that 10x leverage your brokerage offered and dump
your life savings into it. We still partied like it was 1999 (since it was),
but we were all ready for the day when the party ended.

Then it did. And we went on with our lives.

We might just do the same thing in a year or two. And again, it probably won't
be that big a deal.

------
steveax
In Portland (where I was and still reside) it was pretty ugly. Pretty much
everyone I knew in tech was unemployed for long-ish periods. I gave up hunting
and started my own business freelancing - did that for over ten years. That
gradually got better over time and by 2005 or so I was making more than my
last salaried position. During that period I learned to live below my means
and always have a 6+ month cushion, so all-in-all it wasn't a terrible thing.

------
johngalt
In general it was good for the industry. At the peak of the bubble there was
about a 50:1 ratio of pretenders to experts. Easy money tends to scoop up a
lot of people who don't really belong. The same way that suddenly everyone was
involved in real estate during the housing bubble.

> What were job-prospects like?

IIRC development went off a cliff. Even people who were in secure industries
were at risk because of the deflation in salaries. IT/Operations was
reasonably safe.

> How were your wages affected?

Roughly cut in half overall. Through the worst of it in two years then back to
normal.

> Well-insulated if/when the next crash happens?

Aside from a good savings account. Don't be afraid to pick up a little ops
experience. Most people I knew who sailed through the bubble spent a few years
doing in-house work for some non-tech company. There is always work closer to
the business side. When times are good it's all about wish fulfillment with
new services/features etc... During a downturn it's ruthlessly about costs.

------
kraig911
I went through about 12 jobs in the span of 6 months I think? At first it was
easy to pivot into another opporunity but when it sunk it was hard... I was
doing a lot of 'shockwave' and perl work - and still I wasn't sure wtf I was
doing half the time. I went a year pretty much unemployed and start working in
tv broadcasting but the pay there was equally bad.

I can understand why it happened. No one was educated some guy would get
millions of funding for nothing but hype and high tail it out of there. People
had money and were just cramming into places that didn't have a plan. I could
literally walk into a place and make an animated gif on a webpage and people
would oooooo'.

When it crashed it was literally like a vacuum and we all lived our life like
'that' didn't happen.

------
poulsbohemian
If you are serious about a long-term career in tech and you are concerned
about this, here are some considerations:

1) There are industries like health care and insurance that have traditionally
been good places to hang your hat during a downturn. If you can learn about
regulations, trends, and domain-specific tech in those fields, you will always
have a job.

2) Both in the dot-com era and more recently, there were loads of people who
entered the industry because they saw dollar signs. If a downturn hits, many
will be quickly weeded out because they won't have put in the hard work to
round out their skills and portfolio, or thought about their long-term career
progression. You can avoid being pruned by planning ahead and taking action
now to make sure you've got solid credentials.

------
kasey_junk
The answer to this is dependent on so many factors that you really need to
pull them apart a little:

\- where in your career you were \- where in location you were \- what kind of
employer you had

Far and away the hardest hit during the last crash were new-grads who had
accepted job offers that hadn't actually started yet. Those jobs immediately
went away and there was nothing to replace them with. I know of lots of people
who left tech in general after this, and others who constitute a "lost"
generation that has always made less money/done less interesting things
because of this. Everyone up the experience ladder did better in an almost
exponential way. That is, junior devs either spent a lot of time unemployed or
accepted jobs at salaries well below what they were expecting. More
experienced devs ended up hunkering down in "boring" jobs and saw their wages
stagnate for a few years etc.

SV and the west coast in general got hit much harder than the rest of the
country. NYC, Chicago, Texas, Minneapolis, Atl, etc had down cycles but their
diversified employer base meant that it was muted by comparison.

Besides the obvious dying of unsustainable startups and their employees, the
people in tech. services were much more impacted than other industries.
Particularly hard hit, were body shops and the big consultancies. Finance,
insurance, pharma, etc all took much less of a hit.

I'd add that along with the dot com bubble, several other factors added in to
make the last crash particularly brutal. Lots of enterprises used the 2000 bug
scare as an excuse to retool and there was tons of work that went away after
that ramped down. Then 9/11 came along and put a major hit on companies
willingness to spend on infrastructure.

As far as being "well-insulated", there isn't much advice to give. These are
macro factor trends that impact everyone. The advice for this is the same as
for dealing with any risk. Keep your spend rate low, have a safety net,
diversify your skill set and have a strong professional network that thinks
highly of you.

------
enjo
I finished college in 2002, and moved to Dallas to support my wife while she
pursued her PhD. Dallas was particularly hard hit with Texas Instruments and
Ericsson shedding thousands of engineers. The market was flooded.

I submitted 45 applications. I ended up with two interviews. It took me 4
months to get my first job. I was being paid about half of what I was making
as a high schooler in 1998.

In the end it was one of those strange blessings. That company ended up being
a fledgling Quickoffice which launched me into my startup career.

Still, it was quite tense at the time.

------
zikzak
I went back to school at 25 to get a CS degree in 1997. My first year I would
hear stories of people about to complete bachelor's degrees being flown from
Halifax to Boston (Canadian, here) to be courted (hotel, dinner, etc) by IT
companies.

By the time I graduated in 2001 my cohort were taking jobs at Staples selling
computers so there's that. Many people were getting into graduate programs to
wait out the downturn. I am not sure how this affected minimum education
standards for new hires down the road.

I did OK but there were some lean times.

------
tomh
I'm surprised no one has mentioned F*cked Company so far:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company)

I graduated from ArsDigita University in 2001. Right time, right place to see
stuff completely implode. I must have sent 100+ resumes during 2001, and
temped at Harvard for a while until getting a job through a friend in Feb
2002, in Java development. It wasn't great, so I kept up the job search and
finally went to grad school in 2003 while finding a part-time consulting job,
also in Java. That kept me afloat until I graduated in 2006, and moved out of
the USA.

Looking back, the companies acted like they could do no wrong, and it bit them
hard. ArsDigita was a dot-com darling for a while, but it did crazy things
like sign ten-year leases for a branch office that could seat 20-30 people and
they had 2-3 actual employees in that city.

I remember in ArsDigita University, we weren't based in the actual office but
a place about a metro stop away (where ITA Software based themselves a decade
later, yay lisp), in the basement. We started the program in September, and
one day in March we were let into a larger, nicer office on the first floor
and were told that AD also rented this part as well, anticipating another 20
or so programmers would work here as well. It remained empty until we moved
out of the space later that year.

~~~
x0x0
Ars Digita was fucked by the ceo VCs brought in. You can read some very
unhappy posts about it from Phil Greenspun. He took them down, I presume as
part of a lawsuit settlement, but you can still find them if you google.

Actually, here's a copy
[http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/](http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/)

~~~
tomh
There's actually a few takes on the history, here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun#ArsDigita_his...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun#ArsDigita_histories)

But you are right, that CEO was not the right guy for the job. His personality
+ Philip's no-bullshit attitude ended it.

------
rwhitman
I went to school for web design before the crash, and graduated in 2002, when
the collapse had completely run it's course.

My first east coast gigs were freelance work that I took from video production
shops who got into the business of building websites during the boom because
it was such a big money maker. After the crash they had laid off all the
unqualified staff (random employees who learned dreamweaver and were therefore
somehow qualified to build websites) and started scooping up people with
actual technical education (me) for dirt cheap ($25/hr).

I moved to the Bay Area about 2003-2004 and the situation was a little better
but I still had to look for work aggressively. Fulltime positions never were
presented to me, though there were a lot of on-site freelance gigs out there
so I didn't notice. I think companies were still wary of staffing up. I was
getting paid what I thought were amazing rates at the time ($45/hr). Back when
I was starting out I was always the youngest person on any team by a stretch.
A lot of staff guys were 15 to 20 years older than me with a family and kids.
Some were even older. Might have something to do with who they chose to lay
off a few years before my time, but never asked.

Because of the freelance vs staff situation I basically never took a fulltime
job and stayed freelance ever since. Though after I moved to LA I was offered
staff jobs circa 2006 onwards and it started getting aggressive after that but
I stuck to 1099's. I think a lot of guys who entered the market when I did
went the same path.

------
mooreds
For context, I was a junior developer during the dot com crash, in Boulder. I
worked at a web consultancy.

I saw decent developers laid off, but good developers kept on. I saw companies
desperately hunting for business (and signing ruinous contracts to have
revenue). I saw promises to employees that had been made in exuberance broken
(we'll open a London office). I saw poor business practices--lay offs the week
of Thanksgiving, for example. I saw the business I was a part of get smaller
and smaller as the fat was trimmed.

However, for good developers, there were still raises. I know some great
people who were hired away, so I think that the job market still existed. But
you certainly weren't getting the exuberant benefits in the new job.

I was too young to be on recruiters' radar, so I can't comment on that.

As far as insulating yourself, I think the best things you can do are:

    
    
       * be humble
       * learn new skills
       * be cognizant of the business and the value it provides to consumers, and where it is weak
       * know if the business is profitable, and how (1 big customer? 1,000,000 small ones? advertising) 
       * save a large chunk of your salary, and not just in your 401k
       * keep your network alive (maybe be an informal recruiter? http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1728 )
    

The easiest way to keep a job is not to need it because you have a buffer of
savings, a viable network, and have valuable skills. In my experience, those
developers can land on their feet even when they are surprised by a layoff.

------
vpeters25
> What were job-prospects like?

The market, at least in Dallas/Austin was barren. The only new job postings on
job boards were repost by recruiters looking to pad their portfolios.

> How were your wages affected?

I keep lowering my expected hourly rate/salary weekly. When I got it down to
50% a recruiter called me back and got me something.

> Did recruiters simply cease to exist?

All the opportunistic, bad recruiters crawled back to whatever hole they came
from. Same with all the unqualified "bandwagon programmers" who cashed on the
bubble and gave all of us a bad reputation forcing hiring managers into brutal
interviewing processes.

Recruiters were let go too, agencies closed or downsized. A few good ones
remained.

> More to the point, what advice do you have for developers who want to be
> well-insulated if/when the next crash happens?

Well first, you got to have some sort of financial cushion and a plan to cut
down expenses to the bone: the day I was laid of on 2001 I canceled my phone,
cable, any other superfluous monthly expense. Also moved to smaller apartment
as soon as I could. I knew it was going to be rough for a while.

Next is to know which industry to aim for: after 9/11 lots of money flowed to
military contractors so I started aiming for that industry. I ended up
programming for a company that provided services for the military until the
market recovered.

~~~
blunte
I decided to visit one of my previously good recruiters in person to see why
they weren't answering my emails or calls. What I saw was amazing... I saw
their normal large office, empty of people. There was a receptionist, and
there was one recruiter. There were about 15 empty desks.

The one desk with a person had a stack nearly 2 feet high of resumes. I spoke
to her, and she said she just couldn't read all the resumes coming in, and she
was also having to handle the client side (which meant endless calls to
companies, trying to find open positions).

That's when I knew the old system (glory days) were over.

------
einhverfr
In the Seattle area it was bad enough I started my own business, moved my
family of 3 into my parent's house and tried to make do on my income tax
refund.

------
samstave
Late to the party, but here is my experience:

Absolutely dead.

I went on sabbatical in October 2000 to SE Asia to backpack for 6 months. When
I left, my current company had an open return door for me in my position. I
also had two other companies that I had been talking to about working for
either of them when I got back.

When I got back in March, there were no jobs to be had. I had money in the
bank though and didnt realize how bad it was. Six months after getting back we
had a party where ~55 people showed up. All tech workers. Out of the 55, only
3 had jobs.

It wasnt for another 12 months that I found a job - falling back to my
previous skill as an architectural drafter. Fortunately it was for a small
design firm that was wanting to do more technical stuff - so we were designing
datacenters, server rooms, corp stuff. It worked out well - but for 18 months
it was really really really bad. I only survived because my family owned my
condo and I had a roommate who paid me $750/month in rent which is what I
lived on. I couldnt get unemployment because I voluntarily left for my trip -
on which I spent almost all my savings.

------
codingdave
Corporate jobs and consulting jobs were still around, and most people I know
went that direction for a few years. Salaries dropped about 10-20k, based on
the conversation I ahd with people in those days.

The good developers I knew went into a holding pattern, sitting at whatever
job they landed until things improved. It only took 2-3 years before the
demand started to come back. At that point, there was another split, where the
really good people went off to new jobs, and the less talented stayed in the
same corporate jobs. This then left a few really good years to be working as a
consultant, as the corporate teams had lost all their talent and needed help.
The guys I know who rode that consulting wave have all since migrated into
director or VP positions at consulting firms, and are doing quite well
financially, even if they have sold their soul tot he corporate world.

Of course, not everyone went the consulting route. Many of us just stuck with
coding, but found better places to do it, for better salaries. But most people
my age (40s) have no interest in riding the startup wave again.

------
adrianhoward
Me: Started selling software in 86. In student/ working at universities 88-96.
Industry 96-now.

As for what I did during the crash — started my own web/usability company in
2000. Nothing to do with the crash (the company I left was successful and
bought a few years later — would have made a lot more money if I'd stayed and
waited for my stock to vest ;-) Just wanted to get out of management at the
time.

Just because the VC / startup market was crashing and burning didn't mean that
a whole _stack_ of existing companies didn't want to get on the web at that
time ;-)

From my perspective a lot of it depended on where you lived.

The folk I know who were working in the US at the time didn't really notice a
lot of difference if they weren't in the valley or NYC. Because outside of
those areas the crash didn't cause _that_ large a change in the job market. In
the UK (where I live) not a lot changed outside of London, and maybe Brighton.

If you were in SF or London though you were facing a lot of skilled people
hitting the streets at roughly the same time. Which obviously drove wages
down. For a time it was a employers market.

For me the biggest visible changes I saw were:

* on the bright side: far fewer idiots were hired

* on the dark side: far fewer newbies were hired and trained on the job

* I got fewer calls trying to poach me, and lower offers for London jobs

* I faced a lot of competition from other folk starting their own agencies after leaving a failing startup

The biggest problem was faced by complete newbies or folk still finding their
feet — since there were far more experienced folk around in the job market.
And they got hired first.

Advice for developers who want to insulate themselves:

* If you're working now save money. Money gives you options.

* Be good at your job.

* Understand how to communicate to third parties that you are good at your job.

* Stop thinking that all work outside of the non-VC funded world is dull an uninteresting. It isn't.

* Have connections outside of the startup echo chamber.

* Live, or be willing to move to, locations that aren't flooded by hundreds of people just like you.

------
reitoei
Jobs for developers/designers were hard to come by in Dublin immediately after
the bubble, even for people like me who had experience. Ended up moving to
London for two years to work in a different field of IT. A complete waste of
time, hated the job, but I needed to pay the bills. Things bottomed out by
2003 and I came back to Dublin in 2004, have been working ever since.

------
mark_l_watson
I had previously moved from San Diego to the mountains of Central Arizona - no
problems finding good remote work before the bubble burst.

Afterwords there was not much work for a short while until I took a 6 month
development gig (writing a Sharepoint clone) for a company in India at a not
very high consulting rate, but by the time I was done the job market was
better for remote workers.

------
jexe
My second dot-com (in NYC) almost bit the dust in 2001 after bunches of
layoffs, but management incredibly figured out how to make it through another
five-ish years.

The thing that stands out to me the most about that period in time was how
flat it was. No significant pay raises, no new hires, nobody leaving (where
wasn't really anywhere decent to go). The team and the work fortunately stayed
interesting.

Take that for what it's worth - I'm just one data point. Also, the last couple
years have been too good to us in our industry, but I don't think it's
anything like the absurdity of the late 90's, so I would be surprised if there
was a crash that hit as hard.

Also, to echo what others here have said, we didn't know we had it so good
until we suddenly didn't. If you're in your first job in a fabulously-funded
tech startup with bizarro perks, brace yourself that it may not be normal. :)
But appreciate it while you've got it!

~~~
cothomps
... And at this point "Internet" companies are far more ingrained in the
mainstream economy than they were in 2000. There will be some companies that
will be hit, but things won't be as bad as it was when nearly anything net
related took a hit.

------
bethling
I worked for two companies in 2000-2002 that went belly up. I was lucky to not
be unemployed too long during that time, but it just reinforced that I was
lucky to even have a job. I didn't even think about negotiating an offer until
recently. That mind set put me back so much that when I became a manager a few
years ago, I saw that the company I was working for (one of the big tech
companies) was paying fresh college graduates more than I was getting.

I also remember a few times where I was interviewing tech writers, and they
would beg me for the job - they had been out of work for 2-3 years.

I don't think it will get that bad if the current cycle bursts. There's a lot
more tech companies out there that are making money, and even if/when the VC
money dries up there will be some jobs.

~~~
sirmarksalot
I think the main concern nowadays is that the "actual money" being made by
"real" companies is through advertising, and much of that advertising revenue
comes from startups doing large ad buys with VC money. I worry that if the VC
money dries up, then a lot of seemingly safe business models will also dry up.

~~~
0942v8653
I never thought of that before—as much as I'd love to get rid of this
advertising-centric business model, I wouldn't want to go through another
crash.

------
InclinedPlane
Super terrible. First off, there were far fewer tech companies total. Worse,
the internet was still immature. Which had a couple consequences.

One, there were just fewer jobs and yet a lot of people competing for them, so
it was especially hard if you didn't have a strong resume. Second, remote work
was uncommon so if you didn't already live in a tech hub city you were pretty
screwed. Third, performing the hiring process via the internet was iffy. Going
through the process back then often involved stuffing a printed resume into an
envelope and mailing it somewhere along with a printed cover letter, then
waiting for a return letter or a phone call (which will probably just go to
your voicemail or answering machine).

Granted, the tech field was a little better but not much, and not universally.

------
knieveltech
It was ridiculous. Newspaper classifieds were still kind of a thing at the
time, and I vividly recall section 110 (computer jobs) disappearing entirely
for over a year. During the bleakest period the few local businesses that were
hiring were asking for insane skill combinations, a decade or more of prior
experience, and offering the kind of wages you'd expect working in fast food.
The tech support call center I was working at at the time had dudes with
advanced degrees and many years of industry experience working 2nd shift just
to have some cash coming in. Local news outlets were running stories about
senior network admins and programmers with advanced degrees leaving the
industry entirely to start up landscaping businesses and the like. It got
pretty grim.

------
collyw
Really bad for a fresh graduate in the UK. I was unemployed for a year and a
half (I did get a couple of temporary low paid jobs to get some experience).
There were jobs around and I got interviews, but in the end they all ended up
saying "not enough experience".

~~~
coroxout
Yes. I left university in 2001 and took a 15-hour minimum wage job doing IT
support for a university. The first year, I didn't earn enough to pay tax.

Problem is, I think the words "IT support" and "academia" were offputting to
future employers; possibly quite rightly, as I definitely picked up bad habits
which were hard to shake off. (Working in a team, mentoring/pair programming,
working together on the same version control repository? We never had enough
staff for any kind of collaboration.)

I sometimes feel like I'm exactly the wrong age: a few months too young to
vote in 1997; the government I didn't vote for brought in tuition fees in 1998
and my year was the first to pay them. Always interested in computers as a kid
and had never thought about the money but when I started studying CS at the
height of the boom everyone assumed I was in it to "get rich quick". Now I'm
in my mid-30s and thinking about going back to university just as the
government announces postgraduate funding for under-30s only.

~~~
collyw
I know what you mean about the age thing. I had been holding off buying a
house until the bubble deflates. Now the government announce 20% discount for
under 40's just three months after I turned 40. I would be damn pissed off
about that had I not moved to Spain (where the economy isn't doing any
better).

------
sendquick
The earlier bust had a lot of fluff bursting from the bubble, but there were
solid, growing companies as well. GoTo (later Overture, then a Yahoo purchase)
was ramping up its pay-per-click ad model and several brick and mortar
companies were still trying to gain a presence on the web, and were willing to
pay for it. Google launched Adwords in October of 2000 and its growth since
then needs no recap. Basically nascent companies that were ideas sans business
plan fell by the way side, but there was still active investments being made
and a growing ecosystem online. A lot of capital shifted into that ecosystem--
track newspaper closures with Adwords' growth. Valuations took the biggest
hit, but the work didn't.

------
harel
My own personal 2 cents: I arrived to San Francisco in 1998, so I was there
when things peaked. I got paid more money than was good for me at the time,
and getting a job was easy. Getting funding was even easier. I worked for an
ASP at the time and on many projects. Some ideas were so silly it beggared
belief how they had seven figures in funding and unsurprisingly most failed.
But if you had an idea that included that word internet somewhere in the
business plan - you got funded. If you could hold a mouse and do a "Hello
World" you could get hired. I was also hooked up with one of the larger party
organisers in town at the time, working on their web site and music streaming
app (though it was all 'website' then, not apps), I was also producing music,
playing big parties. I enjoyed myself fully.

So, geeks were given millions and felt like they had to impress the investors.
So if the competition moved to a new office, they moved to even bigger ones.
If the CEO was driving a Porsche, they got a Ferrari. So you could tell a tech
startup was in a building by the multiple Porsches parked outside. The same
principle applied after the crash - you could tell a tech startup is crashing
due to the multiple people coming out with cardboard boxes. Every day another
startup next to us did the cardboard box dance. Our turn came as well of
course. My next job lasted 2 months as that company tanked as well, and as a
new recruit I was first to be let go. Next company lasted a bit longer but at
that time the city was changed. Before the crash I had to park my car at the
other side of town and take a taxi to it when I needed it. After the crash I
could park everywhere I wanted and at any time. After the crash I had periods
between jobs that I couldn't find any work. At all, but I was lucky (and good
enough) to ultimately get a good gig. During those dead periods though I had
to leave the City which was probably the hardest thing for me as I really like
San Francisco.

I don't regret a thing though. And I think the crash ultimately did good to
the industry. It was too much before it happened. A strange gold rush with a
total lack of common sense. The waves to follow are somewhat more sensible.

------
thomasfl
I experienced suddenly loosing my job, wife and house all in a few weeks time
during the dot-com crash in 2001. I went from managing a group of 16 web
developers in a large international ISP to do web server sysop. I was lucky.
There were 45 others that applied for the same job, and I was really just a
university dropout. In 1997 I contacted 7 different companies just for fun to
see if they would offer me a job. They all offered me jobs. One guy offered me
a job in less than 5 minutes without knowing anything about me, except that I
knew how to write html and cgi scripts. It was simply to easy to get a job
back then.

Later I went on to finish a masters degree in computer science and have two
more kids.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Honestly, I barely noticed. Probably because although I was a software
developer, I wasn't a web developer. The biggest impact on me was that my
retention bonus went away. Because the company didn't want to lose devs due to
the dot-com boom draining them away, my company paid a bonus in each paycheck
to some developers to entice them to stay. Then sometime around 2003/2004 they
realized they didn't need to pay it anymore and stopped the program.

Besides that, I never really noticed the crash. Hiring was just as difficult
since the average unemployed web dev didn't do C++ and machine control, so the
glut of developers didn't really help us.

------
ebiester
Every time I hear about this, I think about how much of a mistake I made not
getting my associate's in '97 and heading to the bay. I, too, graduated into
the crash in 2001, but I was lucky because I had an independent study with a
professor who referred me to his friend who was hiring.

Now, while it was terrible for B2C, government consulting was booming. It
wasn't the sexiest of work, but it was a good four years of my life.

I just wonder what would have happened if I could have grabbed the money and
then go to school during the crash instead... Perhaps it wouldn't have made a
difference.

------
colinmegill
I also started programming after the bust. This discussion reminds me of an
a16z deck I saw a while ago... ([http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-
the-world/](http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-the-world/)). As
people are demanding their Wells Fargo account on their iPhone, what we _now_
call 'tech' has penetrated far enough now to be _partly_ independent of the
VCs, so a funding cycle will not mean the total destruction of all careers
which were narrowly iOS.

------
tmaly
I was just graduating 6 months before the crash. I had a job lined up
designing cable modem chips for Intel. They gave me 2.5 months salary to not
show up. I sent out resumes for a while, but no bites. A friend of mine sent
out 2,200 resumes and did find one bite after a while. It was pretty tough,
but I picked up some books and learned some new skills. Eventually I found
some freelancing projects through a friend. I was able to travel around the
world for a bit. I eventually found a full time position using my new skills.

------
arfliw
As somebody who hired developers at that time, it was far different from
today. You could put a job listing up on Craigslist and have an inbox full of
100+ developers, many of whom had great resumes at name brand companies, who
were willing to work for a few grand a month. Today it takes $100k+/year to
get good people and even that isn't enough. You have to give them a reason
beyond money to pick you over all of the other offers they are getting. They
didn't care back then, as long as you could pay them.

------
buddy_tucker
Wiped me out. And chances of a recovery are `nil` at this point :/

~~~
mooneater
what happened?

------
rongenre
Late December 2000, 2nd and Folsom in SF was completely full of BizDev types
talking into their cell phones.

Around April 2001, pink slip parties were still happening, but people were
getting nervous. VC funding had completely shut off, I think.

Late December 2001, 2nd and Folsom -- tumbleweeds and homeless people.

Recruiters went from being suckups to being sorta mean. They never liked us in
the first place. Interviews became brutal. The best way to survive was
learning a little business and knowing the difference between a cost and a
revenue center.

------
cleaver
My experience running my own small consulting company was actually positive.
In the late 90's I thought I was a loser since nobody was handing me seven-
figure cheques. In hindsite, the stuff I worked on was solid and maybe better
than the flashy dot-coms. By focusing on business value rather than what was
fashionable gained us increasing revenues year after year.

2008-9 was actually worse... that was the first decline in revenues and it
combined with changing climate toward outsourcing with our government clients.

~~~
reboog711
In my version of the world; consultants do better when the economy is down.
Because 'big companies' let people go; but work still needs to be done so they
hire consultants / consulting firms.

In US companies; this shift looks good on the balance sheets and helps stock
prices. Because employee cost is a different line item than consultant costs.

I believe the economy is picking up when my business takes a hit.

[All said with the caveat that my interpretation of events could be completely
wrong]

~~~
poulsbohemian
Yes, this was definitely my experience in the 2000-2003 timeframe, but the
catch was you had to have deep experience to sell yourself as a consultant
(thus new grads got purged instead). But yes, many with enough experience to
go the consultant route who knew how to sell themselves did well when the rest
of the economy was in the gutter for the reasons you explain above.

------
psygnisfive
Speaking of The Bubble, there's a documentary on YouTube filmed shortly
after/during the burst.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsVpNB2Lv3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsVpNB2Lv3U)

At one point you see these things, pink slip parties.. fascinating stuff.
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pink-slip-
party.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pink-slip-party.asp)

Anyway, we're not in a bubble, so don't worry. :)

------
georgeecollins
As I recall, talented people were still paid well in 2002, it was just not as
hard to find them.

Also, the "dot com bubble" makes it sound like it happened all of the sudden.
Lots of smart people thought things were fishy by 1998. By 2000 everyone was
convinced. Just because some people are talking bubble now doesn't mean things
are going to fall apart next month. Make hay while the sun shines. And be
careful about car leases and mortgages.

~~~
cothomps
It seems that by the time a career path / financial instrument is widely
talked about as a "lifestyle", it's time to get out.

1999: "The dot-com lifestyle", everyone is an HTML/Flash developer. 2005:
Flipping houses, adjustable mortgages - Mini Donald Trumps abound.

2015 seems to be lining up to be an energy industry crash.

------
mgarfias
Out of work for 9 months, hired at 1/2 the salary (admittedly it was from
inflated Bay Area wage to New Mexico wage) at a crap company that was super
stressful.

I was dumb, had a couple of options to jump ship from the place that laid me
off, and I didn't take them as I was insistent on moving to NM where my
girlfriend was in grad school.

Shoulda stayed in the Bay Area. Rule of thumb: if something smells fishy about
your current job: start looking asap.

------
stevewilhelm
It was definitely an employer's market. You could look for people with five or
more years of experience in exactly the market and technologies you required.

For example, a job posting looked something like 'Five to seven years of
experience building hospitality services using Java Servlets and Oracle
Databases.' They would get dozens of qualified resumes and could hire someone
for significantly less their previous salary.

------
stuaxo
Having only a years experience at the time, it wasnt possible to find
anything, so I spent two years doing non development jobs ( data entry, then a
year on a helpdesk ).

In a way it was good, as when I went back, I no longer did java.

(Edit): 6 months unsuccessful job hunting for dev roles, then after money ran
out, back to home town and living in a place my mother owned and taking any
job I could.

------
tuke
What was it like? It was horrible. My experience was very lucky, but it was
horrendous to see all of one's friends losing their jobs and scrambling.
People who did get new jobs frequently took shitty jobs that set their careers
back a few years. If you did manage to get something new in 2001 you were
frequently locked in for some years.

I have been continuously employed or have had substantial contracting since
1999 (almost all regular employment, except for no more than a total of 12
months of various freelance).

I can only guess why, but it is probably some combination of:

1\. When the layoffs came, I was in the non-laid-off remnant, probably because
I always situated myself to know how everything worked, soup-to-nuts: code,
databases, servers, etc.

2\. Constant re-education, and willingness to use languages and tools I
considered to have technical deficits (e.g., ColdFusion).

3\. Constant teaching. Was always teaching Java or, later, Ruby in the
evenings. Stayed sharp.

4\. Constant networking. Very important -> I networked both at the tech level
and at the business level. Keeping in touch with VPs of marketing and business
development meant that when their cohort was looking for devs, the business-
side VPs would think of me. Techie-to-techie referrals were nil.

5\. Maturity. Was recruited into an executive position in 2002 perhaps because
of attitude + tech skills.

------
snarfy
It definitely made my lack of a degree all the more painful. I had enough
technical chops to get the job once in the interview, but getting the
interview was the hard part. I have a pretty diverse skill set which helped
land some jobs that I'm sure they couldn't find anybody else for, e.g. windows
9x device drivers.

------
saltcod
I knew a guy who did a year-long, very expensive program in "IT". He said that
they did "some" programming, and by the end reported that they were "just
getting into arrays".

So...yeah.... if people like that were getting top salaries, then things were
a bit crazy.

------
csixty4
I was fed up with college in the summer of 1998. I was tired of a computer
science degree program which required classes in COBOL and IBM 370 assembler.
So, I went home to get an associate's degree and start earning some of that
hot dot-com dough. By the Spring of 1999, I was looking for my first
programming job with another year to go on my two-year degree.

That job search took months. Without a degree or professional experience, I
didn't hear back from anyone. Which really stunk, because back then you had to
fax your resume and my local Kinko's charged something like a buck a page. I
was stocking the sci-fi section at Borders and reading computer books at
night.

There was nothing like today's open source community, no sites like Github. It
you couldn't point to a commercial product you built, you had no business
claiming you could program. Recruiters wouldn't even talk to me.

I got a job at a company that hired pretty much anyone and sent them to a two-
week BASIC course and made them web programmers. Literally, the guy who sat
next to me drove limos and had zero exposure to programming before taking the
job. But they could bill for his time by the hour, so...great! You can read a
bit about my story and the technologies I worked with there in my three-part
blog series "Pick is a living fossil of computer history"
[https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/a-living-fossil-of-
compute...](https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/a-living-fossil-of-computer-
history/)

Once I took that job doing Pick, I heard from recruiters at least once a
week...for Pick jobs. Again, unless you had a job with a certain technology,
you couldn't get a job with that technology, because there were 20 other
people with more experience willing to work for the same crappy entry-level
wages.

The early 2000s were much the same until I dropped $1000 of my own money on a
Java certification and suddenly I was getting calls about Java positions all
day long.

My advice? I hate telling people to build up a Github profile because not
everyone has the luxury of coding in their spare time. But that's one of the
most visible things you can do to prove your knowledge of different
technologies. Be glad you have it, and use the heck out of it.

Save up money so you can go for months without a programmer's salary. You
might need to.

Accept that you might have to take a job that's not very interesting of
glamorous. But never take a job in a technology as old as your parents.

~~~
selimthegrim
My colleagues across the hall at my old job who did all the Delphi maintenance
used to tell Pick war stories from _their_ first job. They chuckled when I
showed them Couchbase....

------
nickbauman
I went through a dry patch in the beginning of 2002 that lasted until March. I
then got a job working for a company that was acquired by Oracle 4 years
later. I've never had a problem finding work since.

------
snoonan
I entered the job market at 19 years old in 1998.

I did what's now called DevOps, automating server and code deployment,
monitoring, etc. I could do no wrong. Got promoted, ran a team before I could
buy a drink. Got treated like a rockstar with every role I chose to take.
People needed to scale and I knew how to do it without hiring a room full of
network admins. Serious stock options. My compensation felt like it was
following Moore's Law.

The startup I worked at failed. My friends, colleagues, former managers,
almost entire network all got kicked to the curb around the same time.
Recruiters dropped off the face of the earth. There was no one out there to
reach out to.

I collected unemployment for a few months.

I ended up taking a basic IT admin job for a drug trial company at about 60%
my salary. A friend of mine landed at a small business Windows IT consulting
shop with a bonus structure I could kill, so I interviewed there. I ended up
as a local field engineer driving around to different small business clients
fixing windows desktops and printers, but with an extra hours bonus structure
that had me back up to my previous salary in a couple of years.

In short, I went from a Unix/Linux rockstar to Windows network guy. Now I own
my own language learning business and I'm back doing part time DevOps
consulting (what's old is new again). I bill out at $225/hr because people
want to scale again. It's nuts because just a few short years ago there wasn't
a company on this earth that would touch me for $30/hr.

How does it relate to now? I just spent the past two weeks consulting at a
couple of startups, including directly for a startup accelerator and wow,
yeah. It's the same vibe.

I got back on my feet. Most of my friends did too. I had to fix Windows XP
desktops for pipe supply companies and law firms for a while. I had to launch
my own non-sexy business to really get out of it. Now my tech skill set and
interest happened to be popular again, so I'm taking advantage of that and
doing some consulting. I don't expect the tech stuff to last, so I prefer to
look at my own small language business as my long-term gig. I don't trust
this.

My advice... Industries go through ups and downs, so you will experience it at
some point. I survived by becoming OK with helping businesses outside of the
bubble. I built my own more or less non-tech business on the side that grew to
where I can live off of that if I need to. I advise maintaining a good network
across several industries. If the tech startups bubble pops, you can write
code for industrial robot control panels or billing systems. Network in
industries outside your comfort zone. My sister-in-law wrote systems on
contract for a hotel. A friend of mine works on enterprise tax software for
Mexican companies. If the bubble pops, have a diverse network to reach out to.
The front door's going to be jammed with resumes from people like you, all at
once.

------
antidaily
Let's just say it became way more difficult to get $5k gigs building Flash
banner ads.

------
hijinks
there was a pretty good post about it on quora a while ago

[http://www.quora.com/What-was-Silicon-Valley-like-after-
the-...](http://www.quora.com/What-was-Silicon-Valley-like-after-the-bubble-
burst-in-the-early-2000s)

------
rodnor
Can anyone elaborate on the experience that Product Managers had in these
times?

Thanks!

------
Ologn
> the job-market I've always experienced has been one of ever-increasing
> demand

Believe me that can change. In a heartbeat. February 2000 and February 2002
were like night and day. BSCS's become much more important as opposed to just
experience. You will see more "BSCS required" in ads. Networking - people who
stayed in touch with former coworkers etc. came out ahead.

My career started in 1996. I had very little college, but knew Unix decently
enough to be a sysadmin. I started at a small ISP, followed by a dot-com
startup, followed by another dot-com startup which I was at in 2000.

I thought technology stock price/earnings ratios were at historic highs in
early 2000 and was expecting a correction. I expected the crash, although it
was bigger and longer than I expected. I thought getting some Fortune 500
experience on my resume would be a good idea. By the end of the year I was
employed at a consulting company that placed me as a Unix sysadmin at a
Fortune 100 financial company. Actually within a few months the company laid
off internal staff and told the consulting company (which was pretty
integrated into the staff) that they wanted some consultants cut, which I
(barely) survived.

One mantra of our large consulting company is we never had to worry about the
next assignment and money, but that was not true. During good times, they made
the lion's share of the consulting fees, during bad times they fired anyone
who could not be placed almost immediately. So the security they promised did
not exist. I had time clocked in at a good placement though so I was safe.

I also had my own startup side project which I killed when the stock market
crashed. It was kind of like a Geocities for video games. It had begun to get
traction. It was very dependent on disk space, and I had been thinking of
spending tens of thousands of dollars of my own money, not just on some
servers but on disk arrays. Happily I never bought them. I went with the times
- more focused on traction and "eyeballs" than revenue (although I made some
revenue from beyond.com which sold software online, it was a public company
whose shares went from over $600 to less than $1 and then bankruptcy).

Nowadays my efforts are more focused on bootstrapping and getting revenue
early. It's worth it for an angel or VC to goad you on to spending money and
chasing traction. They have dozens of bets and only need a few to pay off, you
on the other hand might waste years of your life. I spent little money (colo'd
at my old ISP), and a year of time, and learned programming etc. better so it
wasn't bad.

I visited the Bay Area in late 2000 and had a job offer also, luckily for me I
did not pack up and move there.

In terms of insulation: * A BSCS helps * Having lots of money saved helps *
Money saved does not mean 95% invested in Rackspace stock, since stocks can go
down as well as up * Keeping in contact with former coworkers helps * Having
some clean, well architected, "Code Complete" proper code on Github helps *
Having a side income from your own personal web sites, apps etc. helps

Another thing - right now the Bay Area is hot and other US cities are not as
much. But from what I heard from friends, things were bad in the Bay Area in
2000-2001, whereas in LA, New York, Chicago, Boston, DC etc., they were not
hit as hard by the tech crash.

Also, some people I knew were buying tech stocks on the margin in 2000 or even
options (10% margin). They lost a lot. Also, unemployed people can eat through
their savings very quickly. But there is no better insulation than having a
lot of money saved up.

------
bane
Absolutely brutal.

I was a Windows developer at the time and I remember a co-worker of mine left
to join a startup and make it big. He started work at 8am, was downsized by
2pm and the company shut-down 2 days later. I worked with another guy who was
going back to school for a certification, one of those early for profit
schools, they had apparently invested much of their profit and when the market
crashed, simply fired everybody in the middle of a semester, locked the doors
and walked away.

 _Many_ of my peers moved back in with their parents and for lack of a job,
simply went back to school and got their M.S.'s hoping to ride it out. I know
a number of people who left the field entirely and started all kinds of random
businesses: personalized woodburnt gift "cards", home-made chocolates, etc.

The company I worked for ended up simply running out of money, nobody had
liquid capital to do anything like buy things or be our customer. We simply
stopped getting paid.

I left, and through some connections, found a paid internship in a different
career to make ends meet, on weekends I refurbished people's decks and
delivered rides to kids' birthday parties. Through a twist of fate, my wife
was in a weird immigration status and couldn't work (in those days you needed
a work authorization card while waiting for your green card and the government
was way behind in keeping them up-to-date). We were literally eating Ramen and
Taco Bell for most of our food. I grew up pretty poor so it wasn't too much of
a downslope, but it was pretty distressing for my wife. One pay period, my
wife accidentally threw away my pay check in the trash, we wouldn't have been
able to make rent and would have ended up homeless if I hadn't gotten my
company to void it and issue me a new one.

Then 9/11 hit and things got worse. Immigration processes absolutely ground to
a halt. My wife lost a job she had been able to get on her work authorization
papers when they expired and the Immigration service forgot to issue her a new
one. I remember an exorbitant anniversary dinner we went to at Olive Garden.
We saved up for 2 months for it. It cost about $35 for the two of us. We asked
for another basket of all you can eat breadsticks and a pasta refill then took
the entire basket and all the pasta home with us so we could split it on
another meal.

The place I was working at was delighted with me, and as a reward offered me
another paid internship. Nonplussed with their generous offer, I applied to
something like 300 other open positions, but the requirements had become
insane: 5-7 years experience in fields that hadn't even existed 2 years prior,
for entry-level positions paying less than I was making at my internship! I
stayed at my internship. When it expired they offered to convert me to full-
time at the same rate, but with benefits now being taken out I was bringing
home less money!

It was about this time that lots of the courtesy in the hiring process
disappeared, things like calling back applicants to let them know their
application had been reviewed but they had decided to go another direction,
that sort of thing, simply stopped.

On top of all of this, outsourcing was becoming a thing, and tons of jobs were
moving to India. Many major employers simply stopped hiring or fired all their
technical staff and moved everything overseas. For most of them, it didn't
really work out, but it had a major impact in the number of openings and the
requirements for the openings. You literally didn't know if your job would
exist from one-week to the next.

For me, things started to turn around some time in 2003-2004. My wife finally
was able to work after getting her Green Card, my internship converted into a
full-time position with better pay, cost to borrow money was stupid low (at
the time) with bizarre favorable finance rules (that later got the country in
trouble) and we bought a house and started building equity.

The housing market became insane and we sold our house, 2 years after buying
it, for a 40% profit. In the meanwhile both of our careers had turn into
actual careers and not desperate grabbing at scraps. Outsourcing started to
show major weaknesses.

A lot of the excesses of the dot-com bubble and pre 9-11 were carefully
scrutinized. Dumb shit like starting a company and spending half the
investment money on lava lamps were understood to be a bad thing now. Actually
needing a business plan became important. It stopped being possible for 19
year olds with 2 years of experience and a 9 page resume made up of
fabrications to get hired into mature startups as directors of engineering and
paid $200k salaries. Perl started to fall out of favor as a major force in the
development of the Web and Java shops started to become a major "thing".

------
michaelochurch
The Bay Area was hit hard, and startups stopped being sexy. Oddly enough, I'd
say that it was a great time to make money if (a) you'd made the connections
before the bust, (b) you were building something of substance like Google, and
(c) you were willing to play a longer game. The upshot of a time when no one's
getting rich quick is that there's more audience for get-rich-slowly
strategies. Technical excellence tends to produce get-rich-slowly paths; it's
viral marketing bullshit (and overhiring) that's behind many of these rapid-
growth get-rich-quick startups. When people lose faith in charismatic
nonsense, that's the time to drive hard with true excellence and lower-risk
get-rich-slowly strategies. If your goal is excellence, you don't want your
industry to be "sexy", because that brings in poseurs with zero competence but
superior social skill, and they end up (a) getting all the resources, and (b)
humiliating the whole industry when they fail.

Think also about Paul Graham. Y Combinator is a case of him monetizing a
reputation that he earned (and, yes, he actually earned it) by standing up for
startups in the depths of winter. I, for one, plan on making a strong and
vocal case for Real Technology (it shall rise again) after the
Snapchat/Clinkle frivolity blows up and humiliates the current cool kids.
Being able to explain _why_ shit went to hell ca. 2017, as it will, is going
to help us make a case for building something better in the next iteration.

That said, it was a bad time for entry-level salaries, and graduate school
admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05. If you had a $60k offer
(that'd be $72k today) you were in the top third of CS graduates, and non-STEM
graduates were lucky to see $40k. I'd guess that the more experienced
engineers didn't see a massive salary drop (maybe 10-20% at worst) but it
wasn't a good time for job hopping. Certainly that _feeling_ that one could
get a 20% raise, just by walking across the street, died out.

It was a good labor market for finance because there was a lot of cheap
talent. First-year Goldman Sachs analysts were only in the $60-65k range.
(Bonuses could be 50-100%, but they were also working 60-110 hours per week.)
Undergrad quants (that's rare but the positions exist) were generally getting
$80-90k offers.

People expected housing prices to come down, but they didn't decline by much
because there was this _other_ bubble that was building at the same time...

~~~
RK
_graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05_

This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and
heard lots of crazy stories from programs about high applicant numbers and
quality. I ended up at a "hidden gem" versus a top program. A couple years
later I re-applied to PhD programs and got accepted everywhere.

In today's markets it's a little hard to believe that people would be flocking
to grad school due to a poor industry market, but it seemed to be the case
across science and engineering fields. I'm sure that influx also made the bad
academic job market even worse, unfortunately.

------
la6470
One of the most popular site that came into existence during the crisis was
called fuckedcompanies.com which published layoff memos from all the
companies. It wad that bad.

------
la6470
I was a Unix sysadmin and in 2000 I could land a 100k job with 6 skills. 2002
I considered myself lucky if I could land a 60k job with 10 new skills. Since
then every year I made it a point to tackle 4-5 new technologies. So far it
has served me well.

------
la6470
2000 I thought IT was the king. 2002 I knew business was the king.

