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

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

#141

Post by LeonB »

Was sent out to visit a customer- a .com startup.

The week before it had been a buzzing vibrant exciting place. They were using something “new” called XP, extreme programming where you put two programmers side by side for an hour or two and then keep switching the combinations throughout the day.

There were unlimited free snacks and a free wheeling fun atmosphere. A really exciting place.

That day when i turned up, the doors were locked and the building was empty.

I rang up my boss to say the client was shut today. We found out after that their funding had been withdrawn and they’d shut without notice.

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

#142

Post by elevenoh »

palad1n wrote: post #94

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…

>I basically got stoned and played video games for the next 5 months.

Did you find this 5 month period notably changed your life philosophy/trajectory?

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

#143

Post by JohnBooty »

I was on the East Coast, 2500 miles away from Silicon Valley. But we felt it out here too.

It was hard to know if you (as an internet application developer) would ever make a nice salary againn.

I don't think anybody thought that skilled and experienced internet application developers were going to be out of work forever.

It seemed clear that the internet had definitely solidified itself as a part of everyday life. There was going to be an internet, and things to do and buy on there, and people were going to have to build those things.

I think my main concern was how lucrative it was going to be. I briefly made $100K in my early 20s in the early 2000s with just a few years experience. Even at the time that didn't really seem sustainable.

When the crash hit, I soon went back to making $40 or $50K. That was nice enough money but I didn't know how far things were going to fall. Would the market be flooded with programmers? Would I eventually be making $25K as an experienced developer? Would I make $100K again someday?

So I worried a little bit... not too much.

There were still jobs and they were OK enough.

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

#144

Post by Spearchucker »

I had around 10 years' experience by then. Found a dream job in London but they imploded two days after I started.

Took me six months to find something else. And that turned out to be an OK job with EDS, but at half what I was earning before. By 2004 when things had started to recover they seemed to get a fright because I suddenly got 3 raises in 4 months which almost tripled my salary. Was too late though, because during that time I was interviewing at Microsoft.

Crazy times.

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

#145

Post by NetOpWibby »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #82
ralphc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look into the history of the Pittsburgh company? My guess is you did the right thing, in a year you could have been in a strange city looking for a job with no degree.

I did. It eventually folded, but the people I knew that worked there managed to go into some pretty impressive gigs. One ended up as a VP at Apple on the iTunes Music Store side of things, if I recall correctly. It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away…

I like your thought process.

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

#146

Post by bigiain »

jonahbenton wrote: post #50

Will 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…

> and went to business school or law school.

Familiar sounding story. I've got lots of friends who took it as an opportunity (or were forced by it) to switch out of tech careers. Lots of people I know went and became things like paramedics (at least three I can think of), nurses, doctors, lawyers. A bunch were well enough off to be able to reinvent themselves creatively as photographers, musicians, DJs, producers.

(I'm from Sydney, so it didn't hit anything like as hard here, I was at what would these days be called a startup in the online travel industry. We'd hit $1mil in turnover @~32% margins in Jan and had an offer on the table which my would have turned my ~5% equity into a quite nice house paid for outright if we'd taken it. Then when Sept 11 happened we lost 90% of our US customer revenue over night (which was by far the bulk of our customers). Didn't _kill_ us outright, but it took us ~2 years to recover back to our next $1m month. We struggled on for another half dozen years before selling the business to a competitor, and I eventually spent my entire share proceeds from that sale taking a handful of friends out to a (very nice) dinner.)

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

#147

Post by elevenoh »

pjmorris wrote: post #22

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 tou…

>people started watching fd.com

what is fd.com?

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

#148

Post by swagtricker »

Here's ALL you need to know about your company stock options: ask yourself - if I had ($PRICE_PER_SHARE * $NUMBER_OF_SHARES) in cash sitting in my checking account RIGHT NOW, would I dump ALL of it into my company's stock? If the answer is yes - hold onto those options and simply DO NOT exercise them. If the answer is NO - FUCKING SELL THEM NOW! Take the tax hit, diversify into other investments, take a cruse, waste it on strippers & blow in Las Vegas - whatever. At NO point hold actual SHARES of your company stock. Options are compensation lottery tickets. That's exactly how executives view them, that's exactly how you should view them. Trust the guy who "held on" to about $100,000.00 USD worth of options as the stock crashed into the ground between February 2000 and October 2000. I could have paid off $40k worth of my wife's & my student loans, $20K worth of auto loans and still had money in the bank after taxes, but I believe the bullshit & hype. I regret it to this day and I'll probably never get type of stock option shot again.

It's a simple question: if I had the value of my company stock in cold, hard ca$h today - would I dump it ALL into a brokerage account to buy said company stock?

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

#149

Post by swagtricker »

swagtricker wrote: post #148

Here's ALL you need to know about your company stock options: ask yourself - if I had ($PRICE_PER_SHARE * $NUMBER_OF_SHARES) in cash sitting in my checking account RIGHT NOW, would I dump ALL of it into my company's stock? If the answer is yes - hold onto those options and simply DO NOT exercise them. If the answer is NO - FUCKING SELL THEM NOW! Take the tax hit, diversify into other investments, take a cruse, waste…

ADDENDUM: This decision is if you're like me & my wife: born into a middle to lower-middle class family. Have made it to where you are in life via hard work & dumb luck. Have no "glass floor" below you. Have no family member who could have even begun to tell you what to do with stock options. If you're "born on 3rd base thinking you've hit a triple" (e.g. mom & dad have money and will make sure you never end up homeless and sleeping in your car) just ask your family lawyer and/or CPA. I'm sure they have contacts to help you out.

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

#150

Post by PeterStuer »

Many jobs in those days were paid for to a high degree in stock options. Since valuations were so inflated everyone in the game was mega-rich on paper.

When the bubble burst, this created a bifurcation. Those who's options vested in the months pre-crash did become wealthy and didn't need to work ever again. Those that just missed that window even by just a month not only did not become multimillionaire, they even had lost years in normal capital buildup as the non-option wages had ofc not been that high.

This left a profound imprint on a generation. It was so abundantly clear that there was no relation between work and wealth. Two devs that had sat side by side working on the same code for years, one now had a Lambo in the drive on his mansion in the hills and spent the rest of his days playing ceo/cto/cio in ventures in which he bought a chair just for fun. The other looking for a job that paid money to buy rent and food for the month. The only difference between them that the former was hired one month earlier by the dotcom.

These devs were seldom born into money. Their parents had taught them that working hard paid. Those words rang very hollow in this new age of casino capitalism.

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