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As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with

As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with no business model aside from selling ads?

Saif123 11y ago
I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.) A couple of things: 1. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market 2. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true. 3. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators. Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc. -Saif
- bdcravens 11y ago
  I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it". I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr. During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.
tomjen3 11y ago
I was 13 when it crashed but you have to remember that that was a very different world back then - 15 years ago we had dial up (well ISDN, which was twice as fast as a 56k modem) pay-by the minute and it was difficult to sell things over the internet, databases were expensive as were servers. Today I have a far better connection in my pocket, servers can be rented by the hour of Amazon (so you can scale as you grow), stripe is available (at least in some countries) and Postgress is free. We also have much more productive languages than Java 1.2 (now with generics!!). More importantly still, IT is everywhere. Every business needs, or could benefit from, a programmer. It might be something as simple as converting an access database into a real database and do some queries on it (say get a list of all companies with more than X foozies and send that to sales so that they can call them up and hear if they are totally happy. That query alone could be worth north of 10k month for a small medium business) or it might be to do something more complex.

Saif123 11y ago

I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.) A couple of things: 1. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market 2. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true. 3. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators. Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc. -Saif

bdcravens 11y ago
I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it". I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr. During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.

tomjen3 11y ago

I was 13 when it crashed but you have to remember that that was a very different world back then - 15 years ago we had dial up (well ISDN, which was twice as fast as a 56k modem) pay-by the minute and it was difficult to sell things over the internet, databases were expensive as were servers. Today I have a far better connection in my pocket, servers can be rented by the hour of Amazon (so you can scale as you grow), stripe is available (at least in some countries) and Postgress is free. We also have much more productive languages than Java 1.2 (now with generics!!). More importantly still, IT is everywhere. Every business needs, or could benefit from, a programmer. It might be something as simple as converting an access database into a real database and do some queries on it (say get a list of all companies with more than X foozies and send that to sales so that they can call them up and hear if they are totally happy. That query alone could be worth north of 10k month for a small medium business) or it might be to do something more complex.