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I graduated from college right amidst the bubble bursting, and it was brutal. Fresh college grads and junior developers were competing with displaced veterans f

I graduated from college right amidst the bubble bursting, and it was brutal. Fresh college grads and junior developers were competing with displaced veterans for entry-level positions. ~1 year prior I had been offered $120k/yr to drop out of school and move to Pittsburgh to take a job. I decided to stay in school to finish my degree instead, and by the time I did the bottom of the market had fallen out and I was unemployed for 7 months and finally landed my first professional software development job in Washington State for less than half the salary of the job I'd previously declined. I thankfully had my CAD/CAM background & contracting to fallback on while hunting for those 7 months, but it was enormously demotivating & disenfranchising. I was within a couple weeks of just abandoning a career in software entirely and going back to what I knew permanently. I expect it all worked out in the end, as I'm now CEO of a startup doing a thing I'm really interested in and have successfully raised money to fund it along side our early revenue. But, it was still immensely crappy at the time and shocking to see just how extreme the pendulum can swing in terms of available jobs, pay scales, etc.

ralphc 7y ago
Did you look into the history of the Pittsburgh company? My guess is you did the right thing, in a year you could have been in a strange city looking for a job with no degree.
- im_down_w_otp 7y ago
  I did. It eventually folded, but the people I knew that worked there managed to go into some pretty impressive gigs. One ended up as a VP at Apple on the iTunes Music Store side of things, if I recall correctly. It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away on the feature branch I'm currently on until the whole lot of it is deprecated. There are two nascent forks running around here that I think show promise.
  - NetOpWibby 7y ago
    I like your thought process.
kevstev 7y ago
My experience was very similar- I was working on my resume the morning of 9/11 at the start of my senior year. My friends and I all boasted about how we would refuse to even entertain any offers below 75k prior and several had already secured offers at the end of their summer internships. The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years experience in specific stacks I was competing against. Most offers that were secured were rescinded. I was somewhat fortunate- I did not plan on going back to the place I interned at, but facing no other prospects I reached out and they offered me a job- for literally 37k. I swallowed my pride and took it- it was a small consulting firm, close to my house, and they had just scored a new project for a major sports organization. I kept looking on the side in hopes to get a better offer, but got literally zero bites on it. After one year there (and my boss tried to get me excited about a 3,000 but 10% raise) I got my first actual response to a submitted resume for a place that seemed terrible. The month after that I got a second call, that didn't work out. The month after that a third callback- and they made an offer on the spot- for 55k. I was over the moon- it was at least a living wage, and working in finance for a group that was working on what would later be called high frequency trading. Things picked up from there, but I didn't hit that 75k mark for another year or so.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  It’s funny to hear stories like this, because I didn’t begin my career as a software dev and 37k would have seemed like incredible money to me fresh out of college in ‘06. My first job, I was making 21k and I felt pretty ok about it. I’m making an order of magnitude more now, but I’m grateful for learning how to be happy on a 21k salary. Literally everything over that feels like excess that I could do without if need be. Makes it easy to choose the work that I actually want to do, too.
  - kevstev 7y ago
    That must have been in a LCOL area... 37k was not enough to move out of my parents house comfortably... 55k was, at least I could live with roommates and still save a bit- I was in NYC though.

ralphc 7y ago

Did you look into the history of the Pittsburgh company? My guess is you did the right thing, in a year you could have been in a strange city looking for a job with no degree.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago
I did. It eventually folded, but the people I knew that worked there managed to go into some pretty impressive gigs. One ended up as a VP at Apple on the iTunes Music Store side of things, if I recall correctly. It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away on the feature branch I'm currently on until the whole lot of it is deprecated. There are two nascent forks running around here that I think show promise.
- NetOpWibby 7y ago
  I like your thought process.

kevstev 7y ago

My experience was very similar- I was working on my resume the morning of 9/11 at the start of my senior year. My friends and I all boasted about how we would refuse to even entertain any offers below 75k prior and several had already secured offers at the end of their summer internships. The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years experience in specific stacks I was competing against. Most offers that were secured were rescinded. I was somewhat fortunate- I did not plan on going back to the place I interned at, but facing no other prospects I reached out and they offered me a job- for literally 37k. I swallowed my pride and took it- it was a small consulting firm, close to my house, and they had just scored a new project for a major sports organization. I kept looking on the side in hopes to get a better offer, but got literally zero bites on it. After one year there (and my boss tried to get me excited about a 3,000 but 10% raise) I got my first actual response to a submitted resume for a place that seemed terrible. The month after that I got a second call, that didn't work out. The month after that a third callback- and they made an offer on the spot- for 55k. I was over the moon- it was at least a living wage, and working in finance for a group that was working on what would later be called high frequency trading. Things picked up from there, but I didn't hit that 75k mark for another year or so.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
It’s funny to hear stories like this, because I didn’t begin my career as a software dev and 37k would have seemed like incredible money to me fresh out of college in ‘06. My first job, I was making 21k and I felt pretty ok about it. I’m making an order of magnitude more now, but I’m grateful for learning how to be happy on a 21k salary. Literally everything over that feels like excess that I could do without if need be. Makes it easy to choose the work that I actually want to do, too.
- kevstev 7y ago
  That must have been in a LCOL area... 37k was not enough to move out of my parents house comfortably... 55k was, at least I could live with roommates and still save a bit- I was in NYC though.