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Those of us that have been through this before won’t be suckered in by it. Where I am, 2008 wasn’t too bad in tech, but the aftermath of the dotcom bust was li

Those of us that have been through this before won’t be suckered in by it. Where I am, 2008 wasn’t too bad in tech, but the aftermath of the dotcom bust was like the end of Infinity War, just there one day and then gone. No-one expects their career to end at the gilded hand of a giant purple alien.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
I've been asking around about the dot com bust, trying to get a better picture of it The problem is that most of the people I've talked to were employed at huge, profitable companies that made actual products. So it was just a blip for them. I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends..
- haakonhr 4y ago
  I've actually met a couple of people randomly on flights that worked as software developers until the dotcom bubble burst. They both said they couldn't find anything the following years so they changed careers: one became a carpenter and the other ended up as an accountant.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  Finding work was not all that bad depending on your skill set. In fact I started doing consulting after leaving my startup. Was one of the most profitable and enjoyable times of my career. Having been through several downturns in tech I tend to view them as shifts. Early 80's personal computers -> late 80's early 90's connectivity (modems) BBS networks -> 2000 Internet etc. Understanding and adapting to those changes are key. Next up -> IOT - computers in everything - applying AI - Biotech - ? Generally something expensive has to become cheap for the masses. Hayes modems took $1200 - $2000 devices down to <$300. Ethernet made LANs cheap. Twitter made stupidity availability massively scalable for zero dollars:)
- tunesmith 4y ago
  I got laid off twice during the Dotcom bust. Remember that it dovetailed into the post-9/11 stuff too. In Q4 2001, there was just nothing. Intel and Nike were advertising web development positions for $12/hour (not a typo) and were getting flooded with applications. I ended up cold-calling various local businesses, got a freelance php/mysql contract for $20/hour, found a different perl/oracle contract for $55/hour in May of 2002, and worked my way back up from there.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    Wow, $55/hour is pretty decent salary in most of the US today, kudos.
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      For software development, though, $55/hour doesn't seem great in 2022. I was getting $50/hr contracting back in 2002.
      - screwturner68 4y ago
        Yep I was getting $57/h in the spring of 2001, then the party stopped.
        sizzle 4y ago
        What do you think you’d get today for a similar contract position if you had to guess? Really curious
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        Sure, but it was framed as a rebuilding step 20 years ago and inflation adjusted its like $165,000/yr. Making that in the trough of a recession after a lay off seems great to me.
    - tunesmith 4y ago
      It was 1099, not W2. But yeah, that contract is when things started feeling "normal" again.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  The workers hit the hardest during the dotcom bust were people who recently skilled-up in HTML/CSS and basic web design. There was a massive hiring spree for people with these skills and a huge number of those jobs completely evaporated by 2001. Many of those people ended up just leaving tech all together. Those jobs never really came back as websites became more "Dynamic" and CMSes began to proliferate: So rather than hiring 20 web developers converting copy and design to websites you could hire a 1-3 engineer(s) to customize and run your CMS and non-technical people can provide the content.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- davidrupp 4y ago
  I had just switched from IBM 370 mainframe assembler to Java in mid-2000, worked for several months at iXL, a then-typical consulting company with high margins and correspondingly high "bling" -- elaborate office furnishings, massive plasma TVs in the conference rooms, massages, beer cart Fridays, et cetera. That got crushed in the dot-bomb, followed soon after by 9/11. I managed not to have to return to my former vertical (airline reservations), but I definitely had to scramble to stay relevant. I work at Amazon now (usual disclaimer; opinions my own, etc.).
- ghaff 4y ago
  Cisco, EMC, Sun... were all huge (and formerly profitable) companies making actual products and got absolutely hammered when dot com busted. Personally I was very lucky--got a job with a small firm whose CEO I knew well and was (at the time) still doing OK though it went through a fairly long rough patch. But no small number of people, including many who had worked at large firms, basically left tech.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  I decided to leave my job of 8 years in July of 2001 (the layoffs in tech had started by then, but really built up momentum a bit after that). At the time I was doing software development for a semiconductor company and it just seemed like after 8 years there I wasn't going anywhere and we'd recently paid off our house so I figured, what the heck, I can find another gig in 6 months, I'll take some time off. When I started looking around in Jan '02 it took several months to find a 3 month contracting gig. After that was over I decided to go back to school and get a masters degree which I did. Had a few conctracting gigs after that but steady work didn't return until '05. So yeah, my timing wasn't great, but I did get my masters degree.
- d_burfoot 4y ago
  > I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends.. A good reminder that economic downturns can be actually healthy for people, families, and the environment. With less money, people will drive less, travel less, drink less, eat less meat, spend more time with loved ones, etc etc
- screwturner68 4y ago
  The dot com bust was a bit of a perfect storm, lots of people weren't needed because Y2K was over, lots of dumb ass startups with no product and no revenue disappeared and finally 9/11 gave everyone an excuse to chop heads because the economy was surely tanking. The first two were going to happen no matter what an the third just amplified the situation. Through all of it there was still hiring, the week I got hired the company that hired me laid off 12,000 people.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Kinda interesting that this recession was also accelerated by a violent geopolitical situation.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I don’t work in web development (and didn’t then, either), so this may vary from what others are saying. What I experienced was that there was a downturn in 2001. I was working for myself and had a contract with a Fortune 50 company. They kept us on for about 6 more months after 9/11, then let all of the contractors go. But I had other irons in the fire, so it was fine for a while. It really hit hard about 2 years later in 2003, when all non-web contract work dried up and clients started having trouble paying for work you’d already done. That was really brutal for me, personally. I was also selling some software in addition to doing the contracting. I got really lucky and someone saw my products and wanted to license them for their particular niche. I was just barely able to hang on until a year later when things mostly returned to normal. If it hadn’t worked out, I probably could have taken a job doing some development work I hated if I really had to. There were still openings, but they were at places like Accenture, or whatever a small-time version of them would be.
dasil003 4y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that in the Dotcom bubble, the web was brand new. On the talent side, we were still figuring everything out. Most software engineers were used to either desktop app development, or expensive enterprise server development. Most designers were print designers, with UX design having not really emerged from the early human-computer interaction days where it was still more technical than humanities. At the same time, the web had only proven that regular people were willing to try it, but there was no meaningful consumer or advertiser money flowing through it for another ten years. So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. When the music stopped it was a bloodbath because there was so little actual revenue. I don't see the same thing happening now because the web is firmly embedded in our lives and someone needs to maintain all this code. I'm honestly more worried about environmental threats and the sustainability of our way of life than the economy per se.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  It's a lot like the current crypto scene
- senko 4y ago
  > So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. This could describe today, with crypto (tech still looking for solutions to problems that aren't scams), AI (great potential but mostly in a gimmick phase right now), and VCs coming from a decade of record-low rates causing extreme valuations across the board ($5M seed rounds, etc). If you exclude Big Tech (which also took a beating but is managing), the smaller tech scene is ripe for a disruption of a very uncomfortable kind.
  - Beaver117 4y ago
    Collectively crypto failures might have lost more money than the dot com crash
  - eastbound 4y ago
    > crypto, AI and VC I’m pretty happy for all those sectors to tank, they don’t produce value that people would pay for, while we struggle finding competent people for product startups generating 500k per employee.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

I've been asking around about the dot com bust, trying to get a better picture of it The problem is that most of the people I've talked to were employed at huge, profitable companies that made actual products. So it was just a blip for them. I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends..

haakonhr 4y ago
I've actually met a couple of people randomly on flights that worked as software developers until the dotcom bubble burst. They both said they couldn't find anything the following years so they changed careers: one became a carpenter and the other ended up as an accountant.
strangattractor 4y ago
Finding work was not all that bad depending on your skill set. In fact I started doing consulting after leaving my startup. Was one of the most profitable and enjoyable times of my career. Having been through several downturns in tech I tend to view them as shifts. Early 80's personal computers -> late 80's early 90's connectivity (modems) BBS networks -> 2000 Internet etc. Understanding and adapting to those changes are key. Next up -> IOT - computers in everything - applying AI - Biotech - ? Generally something expensive has to become cheap for the masses. Hayes modems took $1200 - $2000 devices down to <$300. Ethernet made LANs cheap. Twitter made stupidity availability massively scalable for zero dollars:)
tunesmith 4y ago
I got laid off twice during the Dotcom bust. Remember that it dovetailed into the post-9/11 stuff too. In Q4 2001, there was just nothing. Intel and Nike were advertising web development positions for $12/hour (not a typo) and were getting flooded with applications. I ended up cold-calling various local businesses, got a freelance php/mysql contract for $20/hour, found a different perl/oracle contract for $55/hour in May of 2002, and worked my way back up from there.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Wow, $55/hour is pretty decent salary in most of the US today, kudos.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    For software development, though, $55/hour doesn't seem great in 2022. I was getting $50/hr contracting back in 2002.
    - screwturner68 4y ago
      Yep I was getting $57/h in the spring of 2001, then the party stopped.
      - sizzle 4y ago
        What do you think you’d get today for a similar contract position if you had to guess? Really curious
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      Sure, but it was framed as a rebuilding step 20 years ago and inflation adjusted its like $165,000/yr. Making that in the trough of a recession after a lay off seems great to me.
  - tunesmith 4y ago
    It was 1099, not W2. But yeah, that contract is when things started feeling "normal" again.
spamizbad 4y ago
The workers hit the hardest during the dotcom bust were people who recently skilled-up in HTML/CSS and basic web design. There was a massive hiring spree for people with these skills and a huge number of those jobs completely evaporated by 2001. Many of those people ended up just leaving tech all together. Those jobs never really came back as websites became more "Dynamic" and CMSes began to proliferate: So rather than hiring 20 web developers converting copy and design to websites you could hire a 1-3 engineer(s) to customize and run your CMS and non-technical people can provide the content.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
davidrupp 4y ago
I had just switched from IBM 370 mainframe assembler to Java in mid-2000, worked for several months at iXL, a then-typical consulting company with high margins and correspondingly high "bling" -- elaborate office furnishings, massive plasma TVs in the conference rooms, massages, beer cart Fridays, et cetera. That got crushed in the dot-bomb, followed soon after by 9/11. I managed not to have to return to my former vertical (airline reservations), but I definitely had to scramble to stay relevant. I work at Amazon now (usual disclaimer; opinions my own, etc.).
ghaff 4y ago
Cisco, EMC, Sun... were all huge (and formerly profitable) companies making actual products and got absolutely hammered when dot com busted. Personally I was very lucky--got a job with a small firm whose CEO I knew well and was (at the time) still doing OK though it went through a fairly long rough patch. But no small number of people, including many who had worked at large firms, basically left tech.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
I decided to leave my job of 8 years in July of 2001 (the layoffs in tech had started by then, but really built up momentum a bit after that). At the time I was doing software development for a semiconductor company and it just seemed like after 8 years there I wasn't going anywhere and we'd recently paid off our house so I figured, what the heck, I can find another gig in 6 months, I'll take some time off. When I started looking around in Jan '02 it took several months to find a 3 month contracting gig. After that was over I decided to go back to school and get a masters degree which I did. Had a few conctracting gigs after that but steady work didn't return until '05. So yeah, my timing wasn't great, but I did get my masters degree.
d_burfoot 4y ago
> I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends.. A good reminder that economic downturns can be actually healthy for people, families, and the environment. With less money, people will drive less, travel less, drink less, eat less meat, spend more time with loved ones, etc etc
screwturner68 4y ago
The dot com bust was a bit of a perfect storm, lots of people weren't needed because Y2K was over, lots of dumb ass startups with no product and no revenue disappeared and finally 9/11 gave everyone an excuse to chop heads because the economy was surely tanking. The first two were going to happen no matter what an the third just amplified the situation. Through all of it there was still hiring, the week I got hired the company that hired me laid off 12,000 people.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Kinda interesting that this recession was also accelerated by a violent geopolitical situation.
thewebcount 4y ago
I don’t work in web development (and didn’t then, either), so this may vary from what others are saying. What I experienced was that there was a downturn in 2001. I was working for myself and had a contract with a Fortune 50 company. They kept us on for about 6 more months after 9/11, then let all of the contractors go. But I had other irons in the fire, so it was fine for a while. It really hit hard about 2 years later in 2003, when all non-web contract work dried up and clients started having trouble paying for work you’d already done. That was really brutal for me, personally. I was also selling some software in addition to doing the contracting. I got really lucky and someone saw my products and wanted to license them for their particular niche. I was just barely able to hang on until a year later when things mostly returned to normal. If it hadn’t worked out, I probably could have taken a job doing some development work I hated if I really had to. There were still openings, but they were at places like Accenture, or whatever a small-time version of them would be.

dasil003 4y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that in the Dotcom bubble, the web was brand new. On the talent side, we were still figuring everything out. Most software engineers were used to either desktop app development, or expensive enterprise server development. Most designers were print designers, with UX design having not really emerged from the early human-computer interaction days where it was still more technical than humanities. At the same time, the web had only proven that regular people were willing to try it, but there was no meaningful consumer or advertiser money flowing through it for another ten years. So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. When the music stopped it was a bloodbath because there was so little actual revenue. I don't see the same thing happening now because the web is firmly embedded in our lives and someone needs to maintain all this code. I'm honestly more worried about environmental threats and the sustainability of our way of life than the economy per se.

snovv_crash 4y ago
It's a lot like the current crypto scene
senko 4y ago
> So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. This could describe today, with crypto (tech still looking for solutions to problems that aren't scams), AI (great potential but mostly in a gimmick phase right now), and VCs coming from a decade of record-low rates causing extreme valuations across the board ($5M seed rounds, etc). If you exclude Big Tech (which also took a beating but is managing), the smaller tech scene is ripe for a disruption of a very uncomfortable kind.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Collectively crypto failures might have lost more money than the dot com crash
- eastbound 4y ago
  > crypto, AI and VC I’m pretty happy for all those sectors to tank, they don’t produce value that people would pay for, while we struggle finding competent people for product startups generating 500k per employee.