Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?

I spent the crash in the financial industry which was hit in its own way: one fire-sold company office, one closed satellite office with a job transfer to a consulting company maintaining the same codebase for the company who closed the sat office. That last was my worst job ever but paid rent. The day the final retention bonus/bribe to take the consulting gig hit my bank, 6 of us resigned to come over to our next early-mid-stage startup. My ex-colleagues from the original office seemed to have slower job searches but all found interesting and fruitful work. (The office was a D. E. Shaw & Co. office: fully staffed with higher than average caliber devs. All found work reasonably quickly.)

In the 2008 GFC, that was much less a tech bubble and more a general financial issue. Our company just grew more slowly as the world worked itself out of that crisis, so I have no meaningful insight about that one.

To the extent that this “bubble” feels much less severe than 1999, I suspect more than 3/4 of qualified devs will do just fine in any tech bubble burst. Terrible devs barely hanging onto their job now could easily be shaken out into another field. That might even be better for them overall.

The strange thing was how suddenly it happened. It felt like the majority of projects got defunded in a matter of weeks or months. Our funding disappeared as the VC firm collapsed together with its parent company. Our customers (telcos) stopped approving any new projects that weren't guaranteed to be profitable within the quarter as they were hit by a ruinous bidding war for frequency sprectrum at the same time.

The reason why I'm saying it can never happen again (in this particular industry) is that tech/internet was a tiny and isolated part of the economy back then (called "The New Economy"). Today's tech industry is huge and very diverse. It's part of everything now. The largest corporations on earth are now tech firms. Back then, there was nowhere to go for many employees in that sector (at least for a while).

I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money, partly because I had refused to take stock options in place of proper payment. So I was able to self-fund some projects that I was interested in with a goal of creating an organically growing company. I've been avoiding the whole high growth VC culture ever since, which may have been a mistake in purely financial terms.