Yeah, @pfarnsworth is stuck on some weird point. Wages in the tech industry went down during the dotcom crash for those that had jobs. And some people lost their jobs and couldn't get new ones. And there were some people who did not have their salaries change, like me. I was not in the bay area, that's probably why mine didn't go down. My stock went did go down in value :-)
No, as I said, as an industry, wages did not go down. Sure, some companies cut their wages, but that was the minority. The salaries for programmer didn't go for $100k to $85k for example. Either the companies died, or they survived and kept wages the same. The vast majority of companies that survived didn't cut wages. They either laid people off, or kept the status quo.
The reason why they didn't is because they didn't want to give an arbitrary pay cut to their best employees, who would leave as soon as things got better. They would rather cut the fat and get rid of employees they didn't want.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc, none of those companies instituted pay cuts, and wages did not go down in those companies. Some of them had layoffs but they cut salaries.
So we've reached the point where you say the (presumably average) salary for programmers didn't go down between 2000 and 2004. And I am at least one data point that shows that it did (and I know of plenty others).
I wish someone actually had data for the time in question, as opposed to anecdote. I find the question quite interesting, and would like to know the answer.
