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

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

#321

Post by ben7799 »

DanTheManPR wrote: post #302
shams93 wrote: post #2

Got stuck with a huge tax bill on my stock options when Yahoo went under, took 10 years of brutal back to back contracts to pay it off. The state didn't care that I had nowhere near the opportunities again they just mercilessly hammered me for taxes until I paid it off a couple years ago but took nearly 15 years to pay off the tax debt and meanwhile I could invest in nothing else.

I've seen something similar to this in other responses in this thread, how exactly does one get a big tax bill for your stock options while simultaneously not being able to pay them off? I'm not understanding something about the situation.

I mentioned it in my post.. a lot of financial people recommended taking loans to buy stock options.

Also in some cases especially with public companies they gifted you the options as income. That got marked as income even if the stock then tanked and you couldn't sell the stock for what the gifted value was.

There were various ways to get yourself screwed up.

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

#322

Post by maypo »

i joined eToys as a developer in the formative days. worked it hard thru the IPO. the S1 sits in a bookshelf. i left when the company still had gas in the tank, but the writing was on the wall. really smart technical people started to leave. i joined them. the bubble had yet to burst.

i cashed out, cut expenses, played golf during the day, coded at night. as the bubble burst, i was already chasing the next thing. never having to witness the layoffs and heartache was a blessing in disguise.

as the bubble burst, startup funding dried up. no one was funding 'an idea' yet it was also a great time to be working on the problems of tomorrow.

having cash on hand was important...it allowed me to relax when others where in a panic

finding work was not hard. having talent always matters.

fast forward to today. its been about a year since i exited a startup that was acquired. outside the bubble again, cash in hand, coding without a worry

i'm already 'dug in' and working on the next thing,

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

#323

Post by chrshawkes »

daxfohl wrote: post #118

I'll offer a story a little different from most here. I was newly graduated and working at Accenture, erm, Andersen Consulting at the time. They had an incredible deal in light of the recession, where you could take up to a year unpaid leave (I can't remember how benefits worked out, was too young to care) and be guaranteed a job upon your return. I took the entire year to travel. There was always the worry that they…

Sounds like a terrible existence for a family man with kids.

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

#324

Post by SkyBelow »

bluGill wrote: post #273
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP was a different company by 2008. The HP Way had been replaced by the usual corporate abuse - good for the share price, bad for everyone else.

Was it really better for share price? Not short term, but long term. HP was very respected before, not so much latter.

If your current investors want to pump the stocks up before using the pump to offload them into pension plans and the like, it makes sense.

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

#325

Post by mekane8 »

I was an undergrad in CS as the bubble burst (graduated Dec. 2002). I was planning to attend graduate school in CS when I graduated but the market was flooded with people laid of from their dotcom jobs going back to school. I went abroad and was a volunteer teacher for a few years, then came home and found a nice entry-level web development job. Very happy that I got to see the world before I settled into a career.

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

#326

Post by jquinby »

mattrp wrote: post #114
shaftway wrote: post #13

I was at ask.com during the crash. The first bad part for me was the options. I planned on selling them the instant they vested. A week before vesting they were trading in the low hundred dollar range. The day they vested they were in the dollar range, with a strike price of 10 dollars. Thank goodness I didn't exercise them or I'd be stuck in the tax boat. So it was demoralizing, but I still had my salary, and I was…

+1 for reminding me about fuckedcompany.com — that was the first thing I read every morning. We didn’t pop up on it but I heard the news of our layoffs on the radio that morning when I was driving in - we were public and it was a pretty big layoff. As for what life was like after, my wife was pitching in midtown NYC on 9/11. It took her a week to drive back home. I knew a lot of founders who for many months kept pitc…

Man alive I lived on that site during those years. If you don't remember or if it was before your time: people anonymously posted internal emails, layoff notices, and so on. Some of them (the Cerner "tick-tock" email comes to mind - though it looks like it appeared on a Yahoo board first) were legendary. And the FC forums...oofah.

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

#327

Post by rubicon33 »

davidjnelson wrote: post #131
rubicon33 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the dot com boom, people who could rub two lines of visual basic (for applications) were getting jobs. If you did not like your job, you could make a phone call and have a few offers waiting for you by the end of the day. Yea, that doesn't sound anything like today! /sarcasm

There was no “grinding leetcode” in the late 90s...

Good point.

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

#328

Post by alexsb92 »

eru wrote: post #318
electricviolet wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the taxes thing -- you can subtract foreign taxes that you pay from your American tax bill, and you also get an exemption on your first $100,000 of earnings, so it really only affects you if you're living in a low-tax-rate country AND making a six-figure salary in USD. (I'm an American living abroad so I deal with this every year.)

Yes. Specifically for Singapore those salaries are easy to achieve for techies, and sort of the point of living here as a foreigner. Otherwise, you are probably better off in a lower cost place. I assume you still have to do your American taxes, even if just to show that you didn't hit the threshold?

Yeah you still have to file your US taxes

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

#330

Post by digb »

ping_pong wrote: post #98

I worked through the tail end of the dotcom boom and saw all of the dot com bust. My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit cards just to stay alive. Entire techn…

Why do you think the outsourcing never got quite as bad as everyone expected?
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