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

I was living in Florida, working for a Boston-based WebDev/ISP consultancy. Smart people, high-flying projects, free snacks, nerf shenanigans, constant hiring, with bonuses for you-name-it. I'd recently gotten a nice bonus for bringing on my good friend as the office's systems administrator.

Business slowed, clients missed payments, people started watching f*d.com, the first round of layoffs came, the execs did a tour and promised all was ok, the second round of layoffs came. We spend a lot of time at Starbucks contemplating plan B.

One day I came in and the laptop wouldn't connect to the network. I stick my head in my friend's office, and say "My laptop won't connect, is there something I should know?" He gets that deer in the headlights look, rushes off to check with the management, and a meeting is convened where the third layoff happens, something I'm part of and he's not (Probable cause for me being out: I didn't play ball on a traveling assignment I didn't want, was OK with the outcome. My friend hung on to the bitter end, and we laugh about it now.) The hardest day was sending back the extra paycheck the company had accidentally sent.

I started looking for jobs, but I started getting calls from friends who heard I was available for a week here, a month there, a six-month thing, etc, etc. I wound up forming an LLC and staying self-employed until decided I needed a nice safe job just before the financial crisis.

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.

It was a rough point in time. 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. Glorious stock options at promising startups after fleecing larger companies in panics about y2k and missing the boom. The parties and travel...

We were joking about the pets.com of the world - buying pet food, selling it at a loss, and trying to make up for it in volume. At least we had a business model that made money, a foosball table, and actual personal offices for each developer. When the stock market tanked... everything just shut down. People stopped buying or investing - and anything that assumed growth, for the most part, died. Starbucks with long, long queue lanes were empty.

As some companies died, there were opportunistic shops that were looking for solid talent. As they sold off our little shop of ten people, I ended up getting an offer and then being one of the folks left behind to turn the server room lights off. I had negotiated a start date a few months into the future, and very thankfully, they honored the offer. Things got worse. There were several more bits of belt tightening - we had a 25% round of layoffs later as the impacts of a bad economy really hit home. I did well/got lucky - but while the first round cleared out a lot of 'charlatans', I saw many solid people go on that black Friday

Salaries dropped - or at least stopped growing for most senior people. The rise of off-shore came and the realities of global economies eventually settled in. Large swaths of people turned their back on development... and here we are today, where it can be tricky to find solid folks again. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

I graduated from college right amidst the bubble bursting, and it was brutal. Fresh college grads and junior developers were competing with displaced veterans for entry-level positions. ~1 year prior I had been offered $120k/yr to drop out of school and move to Pittsburgh to take a job. I decided to stay in school to finish my degree instead, and by the time I did the bottom of the market had fallen out and I was unemployed for 7 months and finally landed my first professional software development job in Washington State for less than half the salary of the job I'd previously declined.

I thankfully had my CAD/CAM background & contracting to fallback on while hunting for those 7 months, but it was enormously demotivating & disenfranchising. I was within a couple weeks of just abandoning a career in software entirely and going back to what I knew permanently.

I expect it all worked out in the end, as I'm now CEO of a startup doing a thing I'm really interested in and have successfully raised money to fund it along side our early revenue. But, it was still immensely crappy at the time and shocking to see just how extreme the pendulum can swing in terms of available jobs, pay scales, etc.

I guess I was an 'average dev' at that time. I was developing applications for a company that sold software to banks. Around 2000 I was into client/server computing, working with VB, C++ and Tuxedo for a transaction monitor.

I never really felt the bubble burst. Maybe raises were slower for a while, but I don't remember it. Mostly a non-event.