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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?

#331

Post by Notorious_BLT »

Aeolun wrote: post #243
yibg wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still telling me this just last year. Met a couple of software developers that I believe worked at one of the more traditional large corps. Over the next half an hour or so they kept telling me about how software is a dead end career and all the jobs are going to go off shore soon. They seemed super depressed about their future prospects. No amount of me talking about career (and compensation) prospects of…

Maybe if they’re not doing their jobs properly, but even if their company is sending pretty much all jobs off-shore they still need someone to verify the quality of the contributions from those people, and that’s where your job will be. Besides, my big company is starting to bring more and more jobs on-shore again after finding out that doing it all off-shore doesn’t actually work.

I work for a consulting company and any time we work alongside offshore developers (hired by the client to do parts of the work) its a nightmare. Maybe its just the clients being too price-sensitive and not knowing how to oversee offshore devs, but every time I've been in this situation, the offshore developers are slow to deliver, their quality of work is far below the standards of the team, and we end up spending time to fix their work.

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

#332

Post by fleetingmoments »

xondono wrote: post #294
bmj wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recession, everyone at HP -- all the way up and down the ladder -- worked 9 days out of 10, and took a 10% salary cut, in order to ensure that there wouldn't be any layoffs. I have a good friend who has helmed several very successful software companies. His philosophy is quite different: it is unfair to ask employees to work take a pay cut…

Well, they can always leave if they can find such another job. I'd love to been suggested that arrangement instead of the "We're sorry we are out of money" excuse I got (while the company was heavily spending in other stuff). 3 months later they "got a new client" and posted new job ads to hire back the positions (while swapping all senior positions with junior staff). What angers me about the situation is not that I…

I'd much rather have a juicy severance package. If I leave out of my own volition I don't get the ~3 months' salary.

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

#333

Post by tbyehl »

As a mid-20s Windows sysadmin focussed on automation for web hosting, getting laid off in '01 really kicked my ass.

Want someone who knows how to reliably and "securely" (by 2001 standards) host hundreds of ASP sites on Windows 2000? Only a few people know how to do that and I was part of the team who figured it out first. Want to turn a hundred freshly racked servers into Windows hosts in a couple hours? I'd just finished building a system to do that.

Nobody was hiring for those skills. For years. Web hosters were struggling to stay alive and automation wasn't on their radar. Enterprises were building servers as pets, not cattle. Virtualization hadn't really arrived yet.

I'd get interviews because my resume was interesting but in a buyer's market smart and gets shit done is less valuable than particular experience. It was two years before a local hoster was hiring for technical roles, and took another two to claw my way back to the type of work I enjoyed.

As the broader IT market started catching up to my specialty, I took a couple year detour into our IT department so I wouldn't risk being caught out again without more broadly-applicable experience. Better to be easily employable than maximize my earnings...

---

Something I don't see mentioned in the comments here is that the 2000-2001 apocalypse launched the bootstrapped startup economy (and YC). Talented people couldn't land full-time W2 jobs, so many of them launched startups on a shoestring financed with their savings or by consulting. They'd gain some traction and become a "lifestyle business", or more, or be acquired by one of the big DotCom survivors.

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

#334

Post by baud147258 »

here's an inside story from a developper in a DotCom era web company:

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35194

He's also explaining a lot of entrepreneur/technical details, since most of his usual audience is not familiar with those, unlike HN.

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

#335

Post by codeprimate »

I think the only thing that saved my career was dropping out of college 2 years early in 2000. I immediately started working in a print shop doing data processing work and earning my chops and programming experience through self-directed automation and process improvements. My friends in retail earned more than me, but I learned far more in 4 years there than college would have made possible. Leveraging my Linux and general programming experience I moved on to web development work in 2004 at a tiny consulting company based in the upstairs living room of my boss. We did "lean" and "agile" right and survived through the bust by wearing all of the hats and working hard. We could provide high quality solutions for half the cost quoted by large competitors. The pay was simply ok (but my colleagues and employer were amazing). Later, with a baby on the way I had to move on for better pay. Leaving was hard, but finding a position wasn't with all the experience I earned at a cut rate.

In short: I grew, barely survived financially, and made excellent connections.

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

#338

Post by turc1656 »

Havoc wrote: post #181
reuven wrote: post #156

I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully. He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recess…

>the boss/owner should be paid last Yup. My dad is big on that too. Always thought he overplayed it, but one day he explained that the people he employs are quite poor. So if they don't get paid they can't put food on the table - literally. While he has a bit more of a buffer.

There's many reasons the owner(s) should get paid last. That's the moral reason. From the financial perspective, I've always viewed it as a risk/reward scenario. The people who are guaranteed paychecks aren't really taking much of a risk, except the general bet that their employer will continue to exist and need them. The owner(s), however, are taking a large risk in many different ways and if they are able to make a profit, then they should get a larger portion of it.

I've always thought of it in this investment sense with the risk to reward payoff.

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

#339

Post by nostrademons »

brutus1213 wrote: post #227
kelp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had several friends and coworkers end up in this situation. Lucky for me, I started late enough that my options were underwater before my first year cliff and stayed that way...

I thought I understood this but the lockup that everyone in this discussion is alluding to has surprised me. Should the tax man not count the price of the security on the day the lockup ends as the strike price? Otherwise, any time you get discounted options with a lockup, it appears you should assume the options will go to zero and budget the tax accordingly. Or am I missing something?

The tax code counts the price at the time of exercise, not at the time the lockup ends. (A lockup is a contractual obligation not to sell the shares: you still own them, you just can't sell them.) The logic, I guess, is that there are other types of property (eg. real estate, private company shares, collectibles) that you may not be able to sell on a liquid market, but they are still items of value that you've received, and you should still be taxed on them at the time of receipt.

You could argue about the morality and rationality of this decision: some people would say it's both wrong and somewhat unfeasible to levy taxes that people have no way of paying. But that's the law for now. There are other scenarios that can get people into this situation as well: cryptocurrency transactions, property taxes, wealth taxes in general. Indeed, one reason we have Prop 13 in California is because seniors were being forced out of their homes because they couldn't pay the taxes, but that brought with it a whole bunch of other undesirable economic distortions.

From the employee POV, your best options are usually to either a.) file an 83(b) election as soon as you receive the stock options, indicating that you'd like to be taxed on their current fair market value (which is usually zero at the time you receive them, because most strike prices are set at the current market price) and have all future gains taxed as capital gains with a cost basis set at the time of the 83(b) election, or b.) don't exercise your shares until you're ready to sell them.

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

#340

Post by notJim »

jquinby wrote: post #326
mattrp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

https://www.bizcominthenews.com/files/cerner-1.pdf
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