I'm similar age.. the talk of hourly wages rings true to me. In the early 90s I was still in HS. I made $8/hr as a lifeguard in HS and $12/hr as a Red Cross W

I'm similar age.. the talk of hourly wages rings true to me. In the early 90s I was still in HS. I made $8/hr as a lifeguard in HS and $12/hr as a Red Cross Water Safety Instructor. I'd clock out of one and clock in at the higher rate depending on what I was doing. That's about $14-21/hr based on inflation. These were actually jobs that were much harder to qualify for compared to most jobs high school kids get. They required my parents having the foresight to sign me up for many years of swim instruction and then lifeguarding & teaching classes. WSI classes were actually quite difficult back then, and I think they still are. I actually know a lot of people working lifeguard and swim instructor jobs make less than $8/hr today. Just an example but I think these jobs are similar to many others. Most places my son has taken swim lessons the instructors are not Red Cross certified, and it really shows, the programs are nowhere near as well designed and the instructors don't even swim well enough to make it through the WSI course. Meanwhile the business owner charges WAY more for the swim lessons. The employees make 50% what they did 25-30 years ago but the business owners are likely making WAY more money. Heck swim lessons weren't even really a for profit market back in the 1990s. As soon as I had one year of college I always had summer software internships. The first one started at $16/hr and the hourly wages went up every year. As far as the recollections of the .com crash in 2001/2002. It's impossible to know how good the blog author was. In the first .com boom there were a lot of companies that did 0 productive work, burned through lots of VC money, and never even shipped a product. They hired lots of people without college degrees, sometimes they hired people who dropped out of HS. "We don't do any work, we just play Quake all day in the office" was definitely a thing in the late 90s. There were a lot of people who worked places like that who had "Sr. Software Engineer" on their Resume and had very little ability to do the job. The .com crash was a correction for a lot of that. There were other people who had the same lack of credentials but did fine because they were legit, had the talent, worked hard, learned on the job, and worked at companies that were actually doing real work. I think today's startup market is different. Code quality standards are a lot higher. There are weird parts of the software economy around social media, advertising, etc.. but there seem to be less companies that are just there to outright defraud VCs. Investors are a lot smarter now. I worked as a Perma-Temp for 2 years after the .com crash. It was actually very lucrative at that time. 2002-2005 were pretty scary. There was tons of talk of Outsourcing just replacing everything in the US. It didn't work.