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

What are AWS to do if their demand suddenly falls and they have enormous amounts of idle hardware?

I worked at a place starting 1998 that blew through 48 million dollars in the span of two years. I was employee no. 7, and we grew in those two years to 250+, offices in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and New York City. I remember the crash where my project manager was not looking too hot one day and he told me he had lost $100K in stock valuation the day before. We all had thought we were going to be rich. In 2001 I quit because I was so stressed out. I mean, I would walk to work through sunny SF thinking, "Please, let a car hit me today". Not that I was doing anything stupid toward that end, and not that I wanted to die; just wanted to be laid up in the hospital for a while.

I quit in May, the company died a painful death about a couple months after that. I heard it was pandemonium there. They simply could not raise any more money. Plain and simple. But of course, I had no severance and no unemployment.

But whatever. It was what it was. I basically got stoned and played video games for the next 5 months. I really needed that. Fortunately I had some money saved away because at that time I wasn't doing anything with stock trading. So there was that.

From October to February I looked for a job, and got hired at a pretty good place, but wow the sentiment was completely different.

I was in the middle of college when that bubble burst, and I kinda felt like I was being cheated out of the opportunities I was expecting to have when I went in. Most of this centered around the internship/early-career period that is quite vital to one's career growth later on.

When I went into college, they talked about all these great internship/co-op opportunities that everyone got. So each year I went to the career fairs seeking them out:

- Freshman year: Go away, we only want juniors

- Sophomore year: Go away, we only want juniors (though I got lucky and had a single hit that I did take up on)

- Junior year: Go away, the tech economy crashed. We only showed up because we didn't want people to forget we exist.

After college, I attempted some semblance of a grad school experience to bide my time, while looking for work on top of it. Unfortunately, I often felt like I was competing with all those people with the critical "4-5 years of experience" who were unemployed. Furthermore, everything I did find seemed to be crappy contract positions requiring tons of experience for very little pay.

Eventually I got a gov't job that needed my degree, but didn't use or develop my skills. I got quite depressed, as I felt like all my education and personal development was going to waste and was going to rapidly become worthless. When I finally escaped, it was to a worthless job at a different employer that actually had future grown opportunities. This ultimately allowed me to pivot into the kind of job I actually wanted, and the rest is history.

Of course the takeaway from this is that I was already 4-5 years post-graduation before I had the opportunity to take my career in the direction I was expecting to go immediately after leaving school.

I worked through the tail end of the dotcom boom and saw all of the dot com bust.

My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit cards just to stay alive. Entire technology parks were abandoned wastelands.

Even worse was that the idea of "outsourcing" to India started up during this time. So not only we were losing our jobs, the thought was that we could possibly be losing our jobs forever, because why wouldn't the engineers in India be just as effective for 1/5 the price? The per-capita job loss in Silicon Valley was worse than Detroit in the 80s, and the job losses were so bad that the traffic on 101 was actually okay.

I honestly felt like my way of life was dead, I even went to the hospital for a panic attack. Take into considering that while the wages for software engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now. I was making good money, almost 6 figures, and it felt like I might have to find a new job in less than 5 years. It felt like a very dire situation.

After a couple of years, things started to stabilize, and it didn't feel so dire. However, I think people who went through the bust like I did were naturally reticent about joining companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc which were the next wave of companies that defined Silicon Valley so we missed out on a lot of upside.