I got hired as employee #12 in a dotcom in March 2000; by December I was out of a job. In between, the company raised and mostly spent about $35 million. The bi

I got hired as employee #12 in a dotcom in March 2000; by December I was out of a job. In between, the company raised and mostly spent about $35 million. The biggest single expenditure was a huge deal to own a topic channel on AltaVista, which was one of the big portal sites of the day. Everyone was building portals because search engines were dead ends that were hard to monetize (seriously, this is what people thought). Yahoo was the 800 lb gorilla of websites that everyone tried to emulate. I knew a bit of coding and was scheduled for the Arsdigita boot camp [1] that would learn me up to be a real programmer. Instead I got laid off with 3 months severance. They had the decency to do it on December 2 so I had health care through Christmas. I got a job with a local tech consultant about 3 months later, which paid the same as the dotcom job. I kept my dotcom stock option paperwork for a little while for nostalgia's sake... {sigh} I thought I was on my way to being rich the day I got those papers... [1] https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-camp https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-camp (This will give you an idea of what a web programmer was expected to be able to do back then. Today what would you call someone who can install Unix on hardware, install and configure Oracle, install and configure a CMS, and code up an entire web site?)