The product we were making was quite solid and also quite generic, but the management/investors decided to concentrate on dotcom related markets which ultimately went bust later. Our core development team did not suffer that much, but around us there were so many layoffs I lost count. I personally survived at least five layoffs.
It was actually quite interesting time to live in Silicon Valley. My coworkers all still believed in dotcoms although those companies had lost much of their market value. I had just taken some introductory finance classes and knew that fundamentally all this was unsound -- and had some interesting chats explaining to coworkers that diversifying means more than investing in few different dotcom stocks.
I continued to work there as the work was interesting, pay was good and it was interesting to see Silicon Valley through the disillusionment phase as it is part of the history.
Since I was working only for one company I did not have very wide vision, but it seemed to me Silicon Valley was full of gold diggers at the time. It was quite something to see several minutes of job ads before movies, for example.
The company did very crazy decisions. Their goal was to get listed in NASDAQ, and for this all the graphs had to show exponential growth no matter whether it was unsustainable. This meant stupid hiring, offices in all continents etc.
By stupid hiring I mean that some people were clearly hired just for the head count, not to provide any real valuable service. But our core development was kind of inner ring that was protected and continued doing interesting work throughout all the craziness around.
I was once traveling with the CEO and he told me that he had just come off from meeting with the investors -- they had demanded that the expenses should be raised to $1M per month.
The company burned through the money in the three years I was there, basically on offices, stupid hiring and travel. After I traveled in economy class in overseas flights, I was told that everybody else was traveling business class. The chairman of the board insisted on traveling first class. There was actually one BOFH who insisted on first class travel too (he had to set up the infra for the offices), and I think they accepted it too.
In 2002 I had enough, so I relocated back where to I came from. One year later I quit the company. The constant layoffs impacted the mood of the company so much I did not want to work there anymore.
I took a sabbatical year, finished my second master's degree and spent three months doing volunteer work. After the sabbatical I joined the company where I had left before I went to work in Silicon Valley.
I was not unemployed (against my own will) for one single day throughout all this. I think what saved me was that I had saved so much that I could be independent for a year, that I worked with smart people who recognized my talents although I was still quite young developer. But mostly it was luck, I guess.
I would not trade away the experience.