4 ms·

Depends on where you were. If you were in San Francisco, I can't speak to it; but if you were in your standard middle American city, it was fine. I graduated wi

Depends on where you were. If you were in San Francisco, I can't speak to it; but if you were in your standard middle American city, it was fine. I graduated with a CS degree in 1999. In 2000, I got a job doing Java dev with no Java experience on my resume, and a 20% raise from my previous job. Later in 2000, I got a job doing Java/Perl (with both on my resume) and another 15% raise. In 2001, I got a Java job and 10% raise. And then in 2002, I got a .NET job (with two weeks of .NET experience) and a 25% raise. The main downside was that smaller companies kept going out of business (which is why I had so many jobs in that time period -- two of those companies disappeared entirely, one of them taking a month's worth of salary with it, which super-sucked). A key thing, though, is that lots of really, really, really marginal developers got hired in the late '90s -- I worked with some of those at the first company that went out of business -- and they very possibly never got a job in the industry again. Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code.

twelve40 12y ago
That's my impression about non-SF places as well. I graduated from a no name school in 2001, and immediately found a pretty decent corp programming job in Denver. Didn't really feel the crash there, everyone was pretty relaxed.
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sirmarksalot 12y ago
> Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code. I think they also took it as an excuse to suck even more at interviewing. Since the pile of applicants was practically endless, you could reject people for any damn reason, and nobody would call you on it. At one point somebody was telling me that their standard interview question was "draw me a house." And if they picked up the pen without asking follow-up questions, that was a no-hire. I think that was also around the time the manhole-cover questions started taking off.
- Agathos 12y ago
  "Draw me a house," with the gotcha if you don't ask questions, is described by Fred Moody in I Sing the Body Electronic. That's early 90s Microsoft.
  - sirmarksalot 12y ago
    Interesting. While I understand the reasoning behind it, I just don't see how it would actually predict how the candidate would behave in the actual job. It seems more likely to divide candidates into a) people who thought this was setup for a bigger question, and b) people who'd been coached on this sort of thing.
yardie 12y ago
I assumed I was safe being in Virginia. What I didn't realise was that Northern Virginia was a major tech hub and got hit pretty hard. The university started holding seminars to fight the anxiety students were having over finding jobs.

twelve40 12y ago

That's my impression about non-SF places as well. I graduated from a no name school in 2001, and immediately found a pretty decent corp programming job in Denver. Didn't really feel the crash there, everyone was pretty relaxed.

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sirmarksalot 12y ago

> Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code. I think they also took it as an excuse to suck even more at interviewing. Since the pile of applicants was practically endless, you could reject people for any damn reason, and nobody would call you on it. At one point somebody was telling me that their standard interview question was "draw me a house." And if they picked up the pen without asking follow-up questions, that was a no-hire. I think that was also around the time the manhole-cover questions started taking off.

Agathos 12y ago
"Draw me a house," with the gotcha if you don't ask questions, is described by Fred Moody in I Sing the Body Electronic. That's early 90s Microsoft.
- sirmarksalot 12y ago
  Interesting. While I understand the reasoning behind it, I just don't see how it would actually predict how the candidate would behave in the actual job. It seems more likely to divide candidates into a) people who thought this was setup for a bigger question, and b) people who'd been coached on this sort of thing.

yardie 12y ago

I assumed I was safe being in Virginia. What I didn't realise was that Northern Virginia was a major tech hub and got hit pretty hard. The university started holding seminars to fight the anxiety students were having over finding jobs.