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

Idk I graduated into the Great Recession and ignored it at first. Undergrad just didn’t prepare me for professional planning nor woke me up to the relevant market pressures. I’d say it’s important to know what’s going on in the market to inform both things like immediate savings priorities, but also medium term choices and direction. For example, I knew my programming chops could be honed into marketable skill, but I didn’t foresee my math BS becoming as relevant to highly valuable jobs like it has.

I definitely wouldn’t have moved somewhere the economy depended so greatly on luxury goods and services, for instance. It was hit really hard by the GR.

My experience was very similar- I was working on my resume the morning of 9/11 at the start of my senior year. My friends and I all boasted about how we would refuse to even entertain any offers below 75k prior and several had already secured offers at the end of their summer internships.

The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years experience in specific stacks I was competing against. Most offers that were secured were rescinded.

I was somewhat fortunate- I did not plan on going back to the place I interned at, but facing no other prospects I reached out and they offered me a job- for literally 37k. I swallowed my pride and took it- it was a small consulting firm, close to my house, and they had just scored a new project for a major sports organization.

I kept looking on the side in hopes to get a better offer, but got literally zero bites on it. After one year there (and my boss tried to get me excited about a 3,000 but 10% raise) I got my first actual response to a submitted resume for a place that seemed terrible. The month after that I got a second call, that didn't work out. The month after that a third callback- and they made an offer on the spot- for 55k. I was over the moon- it was at least a living wage, and working in finance for a group that was working on what would later be called high frequency trading.

Things picked up from there, but I didn't hit that 75k mark for another year or so.

I stupidly left college to join a dot com for all kinds of fun things like a huge salary, bonuses, dual monitors, my own office space, a big cool office building.

Then, after about 6 months, the company funding our company just pulled out. Left us with a few bucks in the bank.

I took another dot com job about 400 miles away and got out of there. Lots of people there had no jobs after that, but a few of the smarter crew went on to huge companies like Microsoft.

The next dot com I went to, I was there through 9/11. Something inside me changed after that and I actually quit to pursue a different type of work. That dot com also went bust, but it never had any hope anyway. The owner was self-funding it with money he made from investing in dot coms - but he cashed out at the right time, and he was basically making a clone of another service. It was pretty terrible.

It was certainly a strange time.

The funny thing is, I just got hired as a contractor to work for another dot com that reminds be of those ridiculous days. At least all my eggs aren't in that basket. I hope the best for them, but the similarities are scary.

In November 2000 my options were worth $2.4m on paper but they did not start vesting until January. In January they were worth -$1.5m and never exceeded the strike price again, at a company that is still public and worth > 10 billion today. They laid me off in february. I got healthy in 2 months and found a small startup with a 15% paycut but the CEO was a WeWork-level crook with a jet and he absconded with all the money 8 months later and it failed. I finally got a stable job in mid 2002.

I worked for a pretty "boring" company; we were never over-valued because of the dot-com bubble, and as such we didn't take a big hit during the dot-com burst.

The people that got taken to the cleaners were the ones who made websites selling belly button rings for poodles and stuff like that. Everyone thought adding "on the internet!" was worth a hundred million dollars back then, and a lot of people wound up employed doing work that honestly didn't need to be done.

But if you were in one of those boring companies, doing banking or whatever, you were probably fine.

It was harder to switch jobs for a while, since there were a lot of people on the market and not as many jobs, but I never saw the Reduction in Force scythe swinging through my department.