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

The 'crash' was a very well needed market correction as few startups had figured out how to make money - and a lot of regular stocks were way overvalued.

It was a little rough for devs, but honestly, anyone with decent chops had a decent chance of securing 'something' - either in the Bay or elsewhere.

There was a huge drop off in marketing, biz dev etc. over the span of a few months it went form 'a lot of parties' to almost none!

It recovered somewhat after a few years - Google did an IPO that went really well. Then the Facebook craze started.

The 20008 crisis was much, much worse as it hit the entire American economy in a very powerful way - not just a stock/.com correction.

FYI the 'telecom bubble' was 5x bigger than the '.com' bubble, there were huge investments in optical switch companies you never heard about that went bust.

That said - the buzz since 2012 has been stronger than in .com. During .com all this zany stuff, startups etc. were completely new. So it was completely new math. By 2010-2012 - or say the real establishment of YC, a lot of the zanyiness had been normalised and it metastasised throughout the world in a way. The valuations these days are 10x-100x bigger and the game is significantly more global. In .com companies that did a $500M IPO were 'huge' or whatever. Nowadays, it's almost not going to make the news.

The correction that's coming eventually probably won't be as severe as there's no reason for a real crash. Something will give - probably China slowdown - which will pop a lot of other bubbles. To give you an example - WeWorks' valuation was not actually that crazy - as long as they could continue to raise (and it's not entirely irrational) then they could move ahead. The $50B->$10B drop is not some crazy mis-calculation so much as it is an example of the leverage being applied. A little bit of wind out of the sails and lack of momentum can kill something that might actually be working (and WeWork actually does have some workable metrics, just not at $50B).

So the coming adjustment will affect 'everyone' even if it is really only driven materially by a few things (i.e. China, trade etc.) though probably not severely.

If you do good job and have reasonable skills, I wouldn't worry too much.

Around early 2001 I started at a new startup in Minneapolis. It lasted less than a year, but they let us know when they were running out of money a few months out, which I appreciated. No severance though (they were really _out_ of money, I believe).

I ended up doing contract work for them after I was let go (they stayed alive for another year or so with just 3 people, down from 12). I also had some other contract work I found through a friend I'd worked with at my first position.

Eventually I joined another startup in 2004, which also went nowhere but took several years to do it. I left before they sold for a pittance because it was deeply dysfunctional.

I never felt like the crash severely impacted me. I never had any major downtime and while I didn't do contract work 40 hours a week when I was doing it, that was as much my disinterest in work as it was the work being available.

I think I was lucky enough to have the right contacts and a good rep in the Perl community, which combined to let me find a reasonable amount of work to last out the crash time.

Also, I was living in Minneapolis the entire time, which was (and is) _way_ cheaper than the bay area or NYC or any other hot tech area. I think my wife and I paid something like $1,200 a month for half of a large 3 story house (the entire first floor with 3 rooms + 2 rooms upstairs) back in 2001. I think in SF that would've gotten us a closet, maybe two.

I knew a bit of coding and was scheduled for the Arsdigita boot camp [1] that would learn me up to be a real programmer. Instead I got laid off with 3 months severance. They had the decency to do it on December 2 so I had health care through Christmas.

I got a job with a local tech consultant about 3 months later, which paid the same as the dotcom job. I kept my dotcom stock option paperwork for a little while for nostalgia's sake... {sigh} I thought I was on my way to being rich the day I got those papers...

[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-camp

(This will give you an idea of what a web programmer was expected to be able to do back then. Today what would you call someone who can install Unix on hardware, install and configure Oracle, install and configure a CMS, and code up an entire web site?)