It felt bad because our dot com hopes were dashed, but life for a regular programmer wasn't too bad. I was about 4 years out of college then and it just meant I had to take boring jobs at big companies like Home Depot writing database front ends. I was still able to pay the bills though.
Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
41–50 of 419 posts
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#42This thread is scaring me. Question on exercising and such. I have all exercised options, but not all vested, been here about 2 years, so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise because there was no difference between exercise price and market price. What happens taxwise if my company goes under? Don't I only owe taxes if I sell vested options?
My understanding here is that you wouldn't owe taxes if you sold exercised options (at loss or even) because you would make no gains. You may even be able to write off some taxes?
I'm not exactly sure what happened with people who go bust. My guess is they could have had the type of options where you don't pay taxes up front, and then they weren't able to pay when it was finally time.
Like you, I would love to hear more about this.
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#43I went from being a hotshot who had multiple offers all the time with sign up bonuses to somebody who could send out 100 resumes and not get a single response and once I got a response I was offered much less than I was used to. It was very depressing but also educational. It took me quite a while (probably too long) to accept this new reality. I feel the same may happen to a lot of Startup guys who make big money in…
> It was very depressing but also educational. Indeed. When 2008 hit, it was reminiscent of what ~2002 felt like, except instead of tech it was basically happening to everyone. In that way I felt more prepared to deal with the new crisis because I'd learned from the old one.
What did you learn?
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#44In 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…
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Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#45This thread is scaring me. Question on exercising and such. I have all exercised options, but not all vested, been here about 2 years, so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise because there was no difference between exercise price and market price. What happens taxwise if my company goes under? Don't I only owe taxes if I sell vested options?
Honestly speak to an accountant - there are so many different ways you can get shafted on Tax for Options / Employee stock grants / Capital Gains.
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. That was my experience as well, all the weird roles got cut in companies, all the crazy extras removed, but the companies that had working business models kept on trucking and hiring competent developers, and competent developers at unsustainable businesses had no trouble finding new work. Because at the end…
Austrian school of economics believes that occasional recessions are useful because they destroy bad ideas (not exclusively bad ideas, but many bad ideas) and therefore free up resources for new ideas. Some of which will be good, some bad. For a huge example: Madoff was only discovered because of the 2008 crisis. SEC had plenty of evidence against him for years before that, including the fact he did not actually trad…
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Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#47Cory Doctorow's short story "0wnz0red", about Silicon Valley geekery (not to spoil anything), was published in 2002.
Apart from some technological touch stones, it's impressive how it still feels culturally current.
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#48In 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…
The timing was brutal. I made the mistake of hanging on with a sinking company until the end of 2001. In 2002 there were so many resumes chasing so few jobs that I wonder if anyone even saw mine. I didn't collect another paycheck until early 2004.
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#49I was working for a biotech when the hammer fell. Got “laid off” though to be honest, I slacked and I was certainly at the top of the list of guys to get rid of.
I spent the next 8 months trying to get a job, I applied to hundreds of jobs, maybe in that time I had 6 interviews. Mostly smaller shops without much money or interesting work.
Finally one day I got a phone interview with a company in New York, I was in Austin at the time. Shockingly they offered me a job after just that phone call, I think I lucked out with knowing some weird parts of c++.
I told myself i would never get fired or laid off again and worked my ass off. First in and last to leave, picked up extra projects. I was a rising star, until that company ran out of money. After surviving 3 rounds of layoffs an old friend called and asked if I wanted to move back to Austin making 30% less, I took it as they were at least not actively going out of business.
Since then my career has grown and I’ve been fine, but that long spell without a job or a future was scary as hell. I hope I never have to go through it again.
Re: Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
#50Will briefly share my story, then offer advice:
I was VP Tech at a high profile ad driven startup. We raised $50M (Softbank money in those days). Spent a lot of it scaling up on Sun hardware, ran TV ads, saw tremendous response, then a week later the bottom in the ads business model dropped out. Literally a week later. Amazing.
We went from close to 300 staff in March (60 of which reported to me) to 7 in October. The CEO handled the layoffs.
Most of the developers who reported to me took months to find new jobs.
Many of the non-tech people who had found unique jobs in our business were not able to find similar work again and went to business school or law school.
I had worked day and night to scale up, then worked day and night to scale down. I burned out. I moved, stopped working for pay, lived on savings, went to grad school (in CS) for a while, then finally got back on the horse in 2005.
Some advice- worrying about the next bubble bursting is a distraction, like following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question, but the right plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and whether there is a bubble or not is kind of irrelevant.
You might lose your job in the midst of major investment, or you might weather repeated rounds of layoffs. Random things will happen uniquely to YOU. They have to all of us.
The average story is helpful context but it is not your story. Protect and defend yourself. You are the only one who can.