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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?

#161

Post by jve »

reuven wrote: post #156

I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully. He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recess…

Hey, lately i'v read "The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company" and your story really resonates to what the founders said.

Snippet:

> We have always considered that we have a responsibility to our employees to plan our work so we can assure job continuity. We do not intend to have a "Hire 'em and fi re 'em" operation. This poses some serious considerations. One is always compelled to fi nd the most effi cient way to get a job done. At times it seems the most efficient way is to hire a group of people, work them as hard as possible, and when the job is fi nished, send them home. Well, even if this is the most efficient way, we have never operated in this manner. Bill and I do not feel this is the best way for a company like ours to operate. We have very rigid requirements of technical competence to maintain and rigid requirements in the quality of our equipment. This requires that we have and keep good people at all times. So we feel it is our responsibility to provide opportunity and job security to the best of our ability. This means specifically, sometimes we ask people to work overtime in order to meet customers' demands rather than hire additional people. While this is an imposition in a sense to our employees, it seems to be generally acceptable and we feel it is preferable to "hiring and firing." This is something you all need to understand as supervisors.

https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-...

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

#162

Post by knolax »

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 would walk to work through sunny SF thinking, "Please, let a car hit me today".

I don't know what SF was like in the early 2000s but that honestly sounds normal for SF.

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

#163

Post by tardo99 »

H8crilA wrote: post #110
ChuckMcM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would emphasize this: 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. Internalizing that can be the best thing any developer does. It is way more impressive to talk about all the skills you have acquired in your…

Interestingly this is also the attitude of many money managers (Warren Buffett, to take the best known example). You'd think at least they would take explicit, timed preventive action. Many (most?) of them don't.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say about Buffett, but he's sitting on a gigantic pile of cash right now. He knows which way the wind is blowing.

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

#164

Post by fastbeef »

reuven wrote: post #156

I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully. He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recess…

Scania, the truck manufacturer, did this during 08-09. 10% paycut, 20% time reduction and they encouraged people to use the time to study and improve. None were laid off.

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

#165

Post by patio11 »

Offered in the spirit of "don't believe everything you hear": I went into university and graduated during the post-bust winter. The few adults I knew, plus the Wall Street Journal, were unanimous in their opinion that engineering as a field was done in the United States and that all future hiring of software developers would happen in Asia.

I got on a plane to Japan immediately after graduation. It's been a fun and fulfilling 15 years, but I am reliably informed that there have, in fact, been engineers hired in the United States since then.

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

#166

Post by varjag »

JohnBooty wrote: post #151
H8crilA wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. I feel this was absolutely true for the world of internet applications. The stuff built in the early dot-com era was typically garbage from a technical standpoint. Heaps and heaps and heaps of spaghetti code written in PHP,…

Dunno. Practices in 1997 and 2002 didn't differ in very appreciable degree, just that piles of crap C++ became piles of crap Java. AJAX was made possible not by Google but by Microsoft's XHR and IE5. RSS never took of in any appreciable commercial way…

I would say the bust had no substantial impact on technology side of thing. Perhaps the pricing became bit more modest, and sure, lots of careers were "filtered out".

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

#167

Post by MandieD »

I graduated in 2002, took a "Beltway Bandit" consulting job testing Java code for a Treasury project in a basement in Hyattsville, MD, watched my older friends who graduated in 2000 into dotcom pay struggle to keep up payments on their Porsches, and counted my blessings for being able to pay my student loans and foolish new car purchase.

Two years later, I took a US Army contracting job in Germany, and through a couple of twists and turns, have been in the IT department of a large German auto parts manufacturer for eight years now... where we just got our 40 hour contracts cut to 35. My husband (engineer) and I live about the same lifestyle that our neighbors who are secretaries and mechanics do, so finances will not be a problem unless we're both unemployed for over a year.

My advice: don't take on unnecessary expenses that you would have a hard time backing out of (big car note) or that would tie you to a place (mortgage on something that would be hard to sell for what you owe), and think hard about what are needs (eating healthy food, recreation) and what are wants and conveniences (having prepared food brought to you, expensive activities and exotic travel). Go ahead and enjoy your wants a bit while times are good, but be ready to cut them out when the punchbowl gets taken away.

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

#168

Post by _pmf_ »

fastbeef wrote: post #164
reuven wrote: post #156

I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully. He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recess…

Scania, the truck manufacturer, did this during 08-09. 10% paycut, 20% time reduction and they encouraged people to use the time to study and improve. None were laid off.

Much of this is not due to goodwill of owners, but unions.

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

#170

Post by mlyle »

jen_h wrote: post #133
shinteao wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it. Can you expand on this? I'm honestly curious about what machinations begin once a company dies or the market sinks.

Start a new company. Lots of talent available and investors look for heads-down new things. Classic Namazu stuff.

Capital's harder to get, but personnel and real estate is cheaper if you get funded. And then while you develop, hopefully the market recovers, and there's cash available for subsequent rounds and with customers to buy your stuff.
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