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

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

#411

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

TLDR - your going to be fine.

I lived thru it, I did OK, a few of my friends left the industry some struggled most where ok if they had real software chops. The people that really took the hit where network / sys-admins / corp PC repair-support they where gutted as there was a glut of MCSE/A+/whatever get a cert in 4 weeks make 100k.

That being said, this time it is structurally different, in that period, we where trying to eat the world with software today software has eaten the world. Development has always been and always will be an understaffed profession as it competes for the top half of the intellect spectrum along with Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers etc.

It's easy to assume that you have to be at least smarter than half the population to write software. From there you have the slackers that take themselves out of the pool e.g guy could be Einstein but he would rather smoke pot and work at 7-11. Might not be a significant portion of the population but it takes a bite.

Then the person actually has to want, desire and be interested in being a developer over some other intellect based career. Then a portion of us just burn out and leave.

Anyways there are a lot of factors that lead to a serious shortage in available developers and as best as I can reason it is systemic and incurable until AI gets to the point where it can turn a persons thoughts into software.

I would armchair guess that the pool of potential good developers worldwide is 10% of the population. Those that actually pursue it and stay with it is certainly far less.

Tangential, but that is what I love about these younger companies and their age discrimination and asinine interview processes. They lack the experience to know that their perceived cool factor actually holds no currency and the real currency is in attracting and retaining good development talent. They build so many self defeating filters to them accomplishing that goal.

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

#412

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

kefabean wrote: post #192

patio11 wrote: post #165

Offered in the spirit of "don't believe everything you hear": I went into university and graduated during the post-bust winter. The few adults I knew, plus the Wall Street Journal, were unanimous in their opinion that engineering as a field was done in the United States and that all future hiring of software developers would happen in Asia. I got on a plane to Japan immediately after graduation. It's been a fun and f…

I remember a Partner from the large global consulting firm that I worked for telling me a similar story: “There is no point getting in to engineering as it will all be offshored to Asia; much better to become a project mgr that ‘glues’ delivery together”. Since that point I always regretted not doubling down on engineering and have spent the rest of my career trying to become more technical.

Yep I remember them scare mongering with that line. Which really gutted the already short supply of developers available. I also remember when the outsourcing wave came crashing down on their dreams of cheap development labor and they had to come back hat in hand to US developers who understand US business processes to bail them out. BOA being a big one that's project busted spectacularly. Most of us that witnessed this period held their feet to the fire and jacked up our rates, due to the limited supply of developers.

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

#413

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

yep completely forgot about that dark humor of the period. Thanks guys for the throwback.

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

#414

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #297

desas wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ajax was made technically possible by Microsoft XHR and IE5. It took Gmail and gmaps to bring this to wide attention.

Yes. I remember people (including me) being a bit amazed by the web version of Outlook that first made use of it. Technically MS introduced this functionality in IE5 in 1999, as an ActiveX control. It was a Microsoft-only thing for a while though, until Mozilla/Safari/Opera implemented their own versions. That took a few years IIRC. At any rate, Gmail was what made the world really take notice of what AJAX could do.

For the record there where a lot of people that where doing the same thing before the XHR object, they where just using an iframe and polling to get the data which was usually an HTML snippet or XML. They would construct the url for data with JS in the main frame, change the url of the hidden frame to point to a different CGI script, get the data and read it into JS variables. It was just that none of them got the exposure of Gmail or Outlook web. Now in saying that iFrame polling was a huge hack and a major PITA but it worked. IIRC one of the major CGI/Perl chat apps used this hack to update the web chat window.

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

#415

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

H8crilA wrote: post #24

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.

That happened because you exercised and didn't sell? Also, we may be hearing many stories like that after the Bitcoin bubble when IRS goes through the records more carefully. Always remember to take profits the instant you make those profits, put some of that cash aside for yours and IRS's sake. Always.

Golden rule is if you exercise sell enough immediately to pay off the tax burden. If you have a lockout get it written into your contract that you can sell them to another private holder (e.g another employee, investor). It's legitimate for a private company to want a lockout, they don't want external influence in a company but most will allow internal if you get it in contract.

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

#416

Post by kls » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #11

IIRC, It was the perfect storm. Y2K bug projects were complete, Microsoft had been found guilty of monopolistic practices, the euro conversion projects were winding down or complete. I think Greenspan was raising the fed rates, and taxes were due, so people were selling to pay those. Then 9/11 happened and that was the final nail in the coffin. This was the first, "learn to code," era that I recall, so there were a l…

Another item of note was the acceleration of hardware design and manufacturing moving to China. While it did not directly affect the .com boom, a lot of those individuals that where left in hardware saw their jobs dry up due to all the web companies going bust thus killing a portion of hardware demand and their prospects for their jobs coming back where pretty much nill as when they market recovered that hiring happened in China.

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

#417

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 27, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

richardknop wrote: post #404

not_a_moth wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but you're still lopping your SV salary in half, and if you want a central 1 BR that's not government housing, you're paying close to SF housing prices.

Rents are cheap in Singapore. Way cheaper than they are in London. When I worked in Singapore few years back I paid at the time an equivalent of 1 thousand pounds for a brand new condo in a nice gated community with swimming pools and stuff. It was only 3 MRT stops from downtown. In London to get something of comparable quality I would have to pay at least 3000 pounds if not more.

[deleted]

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

#418

Post by IdontRememberIt » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

mindentropy wrote: post #395

IdontRememberIt wrote: post #40

In Switzerland, the worst event was not this one but 9/11 in 2001. In a matter of a few hours all new IT/IS project were cancelled and budgets for IT/IS were frozen to below the minimum in all companies. It took almost a year to recover a little. I started my career during the summer 2001. I was hired in seconds without any technical test. All (no exception) my friends who wanted to chill during the summer before fin…

Why were jobs in Switzerland affected?

I do not have the numbers from 2001, but even today USA is our 2nd partner: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/industry-ser...

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

#419

Post by MandieD » Mon, Nov 04, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

gunglefunk wrote: post #400

MandieD wrote: post #167

I graduated in 2002, took a "Beltway Bandit" consulting job testing Java code for a Treasury project in a basement in Hyattsville, MD, watched my older friends who graduated in 2000 into dotcom pay struggle to keep up payments on their Porsches, and counted my blessings for being able to pay my student loans and foolish new car purchase. Two years later, I took a US Army contracting job in Germany, and through a coup…

I was working at Treasury in Hyattsville around that time (in the basement as a matter of fact, where I think most of the contractors lived) but that was my first job after getting away from all of the .com bubble-busting BS. Salaries were still pretty good (but flat) for those pros who stuck around and had actual technical skill, but a lot of the newer people to technology had it much rougher.

HPTi?