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

I did. It eventually folded, but the people I knew that worked there managed to go into some pretty impressive gigs. One ended up as a VP at Apple on the iTunes Music Store side of things, if I recall correctly.

It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away on the feature branch I'm currently on until the whole lot of it is deprecated. There are two nascent forks running around here that I think show promise.

Could you elaborate on the similarities?

I worked at a company called Hydrogen Media in St Pete, Florida. We had a bell that would ring only when we got a million dollar deal. It rang multiple times a day.

Our office was insane. Exposed rafters with the trusses and everything painted black. Our walls were deep blue but had blue neon running the length of the room on all sides. No overhead lighting.

Our developer floor was elevated with sub-floor network cabling. We had a dev floor about 100 yards by 50 yards, the size of a football field, roughly. A little shy of that. Private offices had glass walls facing the dev floor. Our sound studio (these were the flash days) was a hollowed-out VW bus in a soundproofed room.

We had a fire pole from the bosses office down to the dev room, conference tables with in-layed TVs. It was pretty wild.

In my time there, I built ~400 replicated sites for Colliers realty, DuPont Registry's website, a bunch of websites for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Tampa Bay Lightning's website among others. We were printing money.

The crash hit hard, and Hydrogen Media dwindled. Massive layoffs, and eventually it renamed to Bayshore Solutions and relocated to Tampa where they still do business to this day.

I was working at a startup that had SF and Mountain View offices at the time of 9/11. SF offices for tech companies were somewhat unusual then, though a lot were under construction. Most companies still had their main HQ somewhere on the peninsula. Although the tech decline had started before 9/11, it really seemed to pick up speed after that. I remember one of the company execs talking about the next round of funding and basically saying investors were "holed up in their bunkers" - that is, not funding anything. I did know (talented!) programmers that lost their jobs - one even collected unemployment for a time. In early 2002, the company I was at closed the SF office, and then I was also unemployed.

After a few months, I found a replacement job at a non-startup in South San Francisco. The pay was OK but work was a bit dull. After a couple of years I moved out and haven't been been back except to visit. Spent a total of 6 years living in SF and working around the area, from 1998 to 2004. While there, I saved very little money and also never made anything from stock options. When I left I had about about 30K in my 401K account and 20K in savings. Hopefully startup compensation is better today. I know the rents are still insane.

I'd say from a programmer perspective the 2000 bubble bursting was bad but not catastrophic. If we are now in a new bubble, I hope it won't be too bad if it bursts. But the industry employs way more people now and is much more fundamental to the overall economy. So there is cause for concern...if suddenly 10s of thousands of programmers are out looking for work, that ain't gonna be pretty.

I was at a dotcom that busted (after going public). Developers were laid off left and right. But the internet economy hadnt taken hold yet and the tech companies were mainly still old school shrink wrapped software.

i started my own company at that time and there were a ton of developers desperate for work.

Because of the huge internet companies that are voraciously hiring and that have huge warchests, I think it will be different next time around.

I can see IT at non tech companies getting laid off and having trouble finding work.