4 ms·

There was no “nuclear winter”. I was an ordinary enterprise dev working for profitable enterprises like banks, insurance companies, etc and jobs were just as ea

There was no “nuclear winter”. I was an ordinary enterprise dev working for profitable enterprises like banks, insurance companies, etc and jobs were just as easy to come by from 1996 -2008.

nikau 4y ago
Exactly, a lot of the people who never got back into the industry should never have been there in the first place, eg. website designers using frontpage and getting paid the close to the equivalent of $200K in todays money.
ghaff 4y ago
I think part of it is that a lot of dev/tech-adjacent jobs that basically had to be done at a tech company or a company that depended on tech companies pretty much went poof. I'll believe that strictly dev jobs were still available (though that's not the common wisdom). It's probably also true that developers at trendy tech companies couldn't imagine slinging Java in insurance or banking. In my case, I had worked for a computer company as a product manager (with some coding on the side) and then an IT industry analyst--and there was very little in that vein.
- madrox 4y ago
  It's beside the point, but I think you're forgetting that Java was trendy 20 years ago. That didn't change until Ruby and Python came on the scene a few years later.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah, probably COBOL and CICS would be better examples in that timeframe.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Exactly, they would have rather gone hungry than suffer being an “enterprise developer”
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And, in fairness, they may not have really had much experience with mainframe, AS/400, etc. technologies. I probably wasn't going to hire a front-end HTML developer to write my business apps. Yeah, there was a fair bit of Webifying apps going on but probably a lot of mismatch between startup devs and enterprise devs in that period.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I was writing C and C++ mostly on the Microsoft stack from 1996-2008. I moved over to C# for Windows mobile devices by 2008-2011. I was using Sql Server and MySQL for a backend. I also did a little HTML/JavaScript and Perl. I graduated in 1996 and while I did take classes in FORTRAN and COBOL, I also took a class in C. I learned C++, Microsoft technologies (MFC, COM, etc$ VB6 and SQL on the job as well as HTML, JavaScript and Perl from the O’Reilly series of books by 2000.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Microsoft and related was probably more insulated from the carnage in the startup world than companies like Sun were. I was much more familiar with the Unix and related vendors at the time. But pretty much all the big computer and storage companies took massive hits. As did anyone who depended on them for revenue. It's absolutely not true that getting a job in tech, in general, wasn't a big deal in the early 2000s.

There was no “nuclear winter”. I was an ordinary enterprise dev working for profitable enterprises like banks, insurance companies, etc and jobs were just as easy to come by from 1996 -2008.

nikau 4y ago

Exactly, a lot of the people who never got back into the industry should never have been there in the first place, eg. website designers using frontpage and getting paid the close to the equivalent of $200K in todays money.

ghaff 4y ago

I think part of it is that a lot of dev/tech-adjacent jobs that basically had to be done at a tech company or a company that depended on tech companies pretty much went poof. I'll believe that strictly dev jobs were still available (though that's not the common wisdom). It's probably also true that developers at trendy tech companies couldn't imagine slinging Java in insurance or banking. In my case, I had worked for a computer company as a product manager (with some coding on the side) and then an IT industry analyst--and there was very little in that vein.

madrox 4y ago
It's beside the point, but I think you're forgetting that Java was trendy 20 years ago. That didn't change until Ruby and Python came on the scene a few years later.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah, probably COBOL and CICS would be better examples in that timeframe.
scarface74 4y ago
Exactly, they would have rather gone hungry than suffer being an “enterprise developer”
- ghaff 4y ago
  And, in fairness, they may not have really had much experience with mainframe, AS/400, etc. technologies. I probably wasn't going to hire a front-end HTML developer to write my business apps. Yeah, there was a fair bit of Webifying apps going on but probably a lot of mismatch between startup devs and enterprise devs in that period.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I was writing C and C++ mostly on the Microsoft stack from 1996-2008. I moved over to C# for Windows mobile devices by 2008-2011. I was using Sql Server and MySQL for a backend. I also did a little HTML/JavaScript and Perl. I graduated in 1996 and while I did take classes in FORTRAN and COBOL, I also took a class in C. I learned C++, Microsoft technologies (MFC, COM, etc$ VB6 and SQL on the job as well as HTML, JavaScript and Perl from the O’Reilly series of books by 2000.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Microsoft and related was probably more insulated from the carnage in the startup world than companies like Sun were. I was much more familiar with the Unix and related vendors at the time. But pretty much all the big computer and storage companies took massive hits. As did anyone who depended on them for revenue. It's absolutely not true that getting a job in tech, in general, wasn't a big deal in the early 2000s.