
Ask HN: What was it like to work at a “dotcom” in the late 90s? - mipmap04
I&#x27;m curious what the work environment was like back in the dotcom boom. Did the people on the ground believe the hype? What did it take to get a job in development back then? Are there any good blogs or articles I can read on the topic? I want to understand what it was like and how it&#x27;s different from today&#x27;s environment.
======
codingdave
The word "startup" was only recently coined. We didn't know what we were
doing. At all. All the standard business knowledge and tech knowledge that is
comon knowledge today had not yet been figured out. Incubators were not a
thing. The VC market hadn't yet figured things out. Hype wasn't about getting
a huge exit, it was about people paying you millions for a static HTML page
that happened to get some traffic. And simply the ability to put up a site
could be a viable business. There was no tie between business value and
company worth. It was all chaos, and truly a wild west type environment.

As far as the work environment, it is exactly what you read about. A few guys
in a basement or a garage. A desktop sitting next to you as the server.
Slinging code and trying to get it to customers. At my first startup, we
didn't even have an internet connection - we developed on a local LAN, and
transferred the deliverable to the clients via FTP from home, or sometimes
even via disk. We got a few customer and rented an office space, and then had
6 guys in 3000 square feet of open space with a few folding tables. Later, we
were able to build out walls, hire more people, and make it a real office.

We went public, had lots of paper numbers next to our names, and then it all
crashed.

~~~
dfrage
> All the standard business knowledge and tech knowledge that is common
> knowledge today had not yet been figured out.

You're right about that. The lean startup, "there's no truth in the office",
Minimum Viable Product concepts just weren't a thing back then, they would
have saved one of the companies I worked for if the founders had known and
accepted them. Instead they spent way too much time in stealth mode, hired a
corporate lawyer to get them a bogus patent, were way too worried about
competitors instead of ever getting traction for their idea, spent too much
time debating details of the website, and who would pay what for precisely
what sort of service, and too much upfront engineering to handle a huge demand
which didn't materialize due to sabotage by the last round of investors who
were found in desperation half a year before launch.

~~~
croo
What is "there's no truth in the office"?

~~~
dfrage
That any discussion of your potential customers "inside" the office, purely
between people in your company, is highly to entirely speculative. You've got
to get "out" of the office and sell your product, or not, to _know_. Hence the
emphasis on having a Minimum Viable Product as soon as possible to know if
there's real demand for it, and at what price.

------
apohn
I attended a well regarded Engineering school back in the mid '90s and people
were getting developer and "IT" jobs really quickly and without much interview
rigamarole. If you could build a computer and install Windows you'd probably
get an IT job (not a great one, but the pay was decent). Able to configure an
office NAT? You must be a networking genius. Pure software developer jobs were
harder to get than IT jobs, but not that much harder. It was also easier for
people with Engineering Degrees (e.g. Electrical Engineering) to get an actual
decent paying engineering job as opposed to software becoming a landing place
for all degrees engineering.

That being said, a lot of stuff that is trivial today was a complete mess.
Ever spent days debugging why all the new computers are crashing and it turned
out to be the driver for your network card conflicting with another card the
IT department installed? Jobs in software and IT could be a total mess because
of all the different things technical people were doing.

I worked for a small company with a CEO who had done well for themselves
running a small non-tech company and they decided to invest their money in a
.com/internet venture. It was almost a textbook example of a CEO who thought
there was money just waiting on the internet and all you had to was build
something. No strategy around how to make money, users, or much of anything.
The company was circling the drain even before the product was released and I
was too young and stupid to quit the day the paychecks started bouncing. I
don't think that's very different than many startups today.

Another friend worked for a bigger hardware company that was living on all the
.com money floating around. He loved it. When everything went bust that
company went bust as well. Another friend was a CEO of a company that was
"Surviving on signed contracts where we signed a contract with another company
and they signed a contract with us." You can imagine what happened when the
bust occurred - all that paper money vanished.

I actually think software jobs are a lot better now. There's a lot more
definitions and better discipline about what a developer does. The tooling is
certainly better. I think there's also more respect and awareness about
software development from others. Plus, I can move my big monitor now and not
end up with a back injury :)

------
BjoernKW
I worked for a .com (a German company, so technically a .de) roughly from 1999
to 2003.

The way I got the job was by founding a startup in the same industry that was
bought by said company.

We mostly believed the hype. However, for that particular company and industry
it wasn’t all hype but founded on reasonable assumptions. The company had its
problems and has been transformed several times over the years but it still
exists to this day!

Working as a developer back then was different because that role wasn’t the
more or less well-defined job it is today (or in larger, established companies
for that matter).

As a developer you often were responsible for all things technical, from the
office network to installing new servers hardware to actual software
development. Basically, it was DevOps before there was DevOps - albeit in a
much less well-structured manner.

Interestingly, back in the day designers and developers rarely worked together
in the same team. It was more of a “We throw web design artefacts over the
wall and see what happens.” set-up.

------
romanhn
The documentary "Startup.com" provided an insider's view into one such dotcom.
Check it out.

~~~
mipmap04
Thanks! I'll check it out.

------
tom2000
I worked as a programmer in SF/South Park for three different startups from 97
to 2001. The hype and excitement was intoxicating. The launch parties were
crazy and money was being thrown around like confetti on New Years. There was
a huge demand for talent and many offers were made on the spot after short
interviews. There were no coding tests. One interviewer said "I'm running late
and have no time to talk to you. I read your resume and I think you can do the
job, the job is yours if you want it" The deepest questions were along the
lines of "can you explain what a constructor is?"or "Can you sketch out an
object oriented design for a vending machine". After the crash was like the
day after a huge party and you wake up in a trashed living room with a bad
hangover. I moved to the suburbs and took a job with a company that inspired
the Dilbert cartoon characters.

~~~
sloaken
Oh you worked for Pacific Telesis? With the whole AT&T breakup and then re-
merge that must be a good story on its own.

------
quickthrower2
I just missed it. I graduated in 2001 and looking for a job was terrible.
Companies that were larging it at the recruitment fairs a year ago were under
water. I opted out of the "graduate recruitment cycle" as I didn't want to
take days out traveling to London when I should be studying. So I was looking
for a job in a state of effectively unemployment.

I was so desperate I applied to a company that was just a one man shop, and
I'd be maintaining Access databases. And got rejected for a better candidate!
I also had a job interview where "we get always the girls in for an interview
to see what they look like" ... I'm a guy, but was pretty horrified. Did I
instantly reject the company? No... I needed to eat. This was also at a time
when "personality" questions and questionairres were all the rage, I suck at
them, and man it was so good to be offered a job by a reasonable company that
liked me for my ability to like ... write code.

I was like hold on they talked to me, gave me a coding test and made me an
offer. Wow that was easy! Like now I'm thinking that should be standard. Any
company who gets me in for 2 full days (after a first interview), unless they
are sending me to the moon, can f'off.

~~~
apohn
>I just missed it. I graduated in 2001 and looking for a job was terrible.

I think for a lot of people that experience was a wake up call to the reality
of the world. One year everybody with a technical degree is graduating with
jobs waiting, the next year there are no jobs and even the most specialized
(e.g. Microelectronic engineering degrees) people are having offers revoked.
Family and parents don't understand because supposedly if you have a degree in
IT or CS jobs are just waiting for you and plentiful. New graduates are
wondering what's wrong with them that they can't even get the most basic job.

Plus, at that time you had to deal with Monster.com, which was one of the most
horrible and SPAM filled BS job sites on earth. Post your resume and get an
"exiting offer to be an entrepreneur" and it turns out you can be an agent for
an insurance company in your local area. That made job-seekers even more
depressed.

~~~
_bxg1
I worry this is going to happen again in the next five years. Things right now
just feel too good to be true for someone with a CS degree (or even a bootcamp
certificate).

------
dfrage
One thing to focus on is how much of the crash was telecom vs. dot.com
companies. An excess of fiber was laid, which was a boon to later companies
like Google which bought dark fiber at low prices, competitive local exchange
carriers (CLEC
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier))
rose and fell based on changing law and regulations in the US, equipment
manufacturers like Lucent were at the whip end of demand, especially since
they financed a lot of the purchases of the equipment they were selling, and
some of the biggest Internet service providers blew up in one way or another,
see Worldcom for example.

The hype? Largely justified, even if the timing was off, there's no denying
this has become a very big thing, note Amazon was founded in 1994. For me
getting a job was no different than getting one prior to the Internet really
taking off in this first wave.

BjoernKW's comments about the job being not tightly defined, and being
responsible for many things including raw hardware matches my experience. And
"cloud" alternatives to your own hardware, even if installed at a colo,
weren't an option, weren't even for the start of 2nd batch of companies
following the crash. And like his experience, one of the companies I worked
for in the late 1990s lasted through it and way beyond, was independent until
a few years ago when they were bought and folded into another company.

One very big difference is that the IPO exit option largely ended for most
companies, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 seems to have been the tipping
point.

------
ncmncm
All the VCs thought you had to have Sun servers running Solaris, so that was
what everybody used. I remember seeing pallets of them delivered.

------
mrburton
It was interesting. Shame
[http://fuckedcompany.com/](http://fuckedcompany.com/) isn't on
[http://web.archive.org](http://web.archive.org).

~~~
toomuchtodo
Pud roams around HN, maybe he kept a copy he could gift to the Internet
Archive.

------
freehunter
I've read Bad Blood about the horrors of modern startups, but I've been
looking for good books about the horrors of dotcom companies. Any
recommendations?

