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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?

#201

Post by ido »

aedron wrote: post #191
phd514 wrote: post #37

I was ~1.5 years out of college and at a small dot-com with a niche SaaS at the time. I distinctly remember 9/11 and the chill that came over our office that day. That passed in time, but our economic prospects never recovered. I used to hit the gym in the mornings and then work ~10am-7pm and I distinctly remember the day ~9 months later when the VP of engineering called me on my cell while I was finishing up my work…

9/11 was well after the dot-com crash. It didn't help, though.

the crash was not a singular event, 9/11 was at the tail end of it but it was crashing for a good 2 years or so from 2000-2002/3 (look at a graph of the NASDAQ from the 90s till today).

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

#202

Post by rezz »

watt wrote: post #184
phd514 wrote: post #37

I was ~1.5 years out of college and at a small dot-com with a niche SaaS at the time. I distinctly remember 9/11 and the chill that came over our office that day. That passed in time, but our economic prospects never recovered. I used to hit the gym in the mornings and then work ~10am-7pm and I distinctly remember the day ~9 months later when the VP of engineering called me on my cell while I was finishing up my work…

> it turned out for the best for me Survivorship bias. What could have happened is that you spend 12 months looking for another job, nothing, you lose your house, end up on street, take some minimum wage job, never comment on HN. We don't get to see stories like that. The stories we see is where it did turn out good. That's the commonality: you must step out of the comfort zone for something good to happen. However s…

What value does a comment like this add? The question asks for the perspective of someone during the dot com bust and this was his.

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

#203

Post by vfc1 »

I was working in Lisbon straight out of college in a consulting company, and we were 300 people occupying 3 floors in one of the city's major office areas.

Things were already going downhill, but then 9/11 came, we had a building evacuation etc. and then in the space of 3 months we had downsized to less than 100 people and a single floor, the other two floors where closed.

A lot of people were sent back to their home offices (Spain, Poland and all over Europe) and then laid off there, as major support contracts were not renewed.

The salaries back then and even before in the late '90s were actually about the same as they are now in 2019. The same goes for the consulting rates, they have remained largely unchanged in the past 20 years or so.

If you add up 20 years of inflation, you will see that back then being a software developer was a very interesting option and a job much in demand.

A lot of people went from development into testing, production support, sys admin, business analysis, etc.

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

#204

Post by forgotmypwd123 »

ido wrote: post #198
adrianmonk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of one company that actually managed to pull off the pivot thing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint They switched from an internet appliance (kind of like an early Chromebook) to smart deep packet inspection firewalls. Not a ton in common between those except that they both require hardware to be built. If I remember right, local lore was that they pulled it off partly by realizing early that they nee…

Didn't slack start as a game studio? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History

So did Flickr. Same guy behind it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield

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

#206

Post by danbmil99 »

This could be a book but I'll do the tldr for this thread. We were a small scrappy startup with our own video compression and streaming tech. We had just gone public and raised 15 million dollars, and were pivoting to being a content company (because tech sucks and content is king if you are in the year 1999).

Our lead investor was great. He told me again and again that we were in a bubble, and to focus on the core technology as a backstop in case the bubble burst.

After the crash, our $40 stock went down to $0.06. I went from being a multi-millionaire on paper to being broke-ass for real. The CEO and I had to fire 110 people, cutting the staff down to about 25. We jettisoned the content portal and refocused on the core IP.

In the end amazingly, the company survived and was eventually acquired by Google.

It was tough letting people go but the alternative was for the company to go bankrupt and everybody to lose everything.

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

#207

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kristo wrote: post #200
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…

I’m from Boise, where HP headquarters are. Many of my friends parents were laid off unceremoniously in 2008/9. There was a lot of resentment

HP was a different company by 2008. The HP Way had been replaced by the usual corporate abuse - good for the share price, bad for everyone else.

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

#208

Post by RantyDave »

testfoobar wrote: post #38
shams93 wrote: post #2

Got stuck with a huge tax bill on my stock options when Yahoo went under, took 10 years of brutal back to back contracts to pay it off. The state didn't care that I had nowhere near the opportunities again they just mercilessly hammered me for taxes until I paid it off a couple years ago but took nearly 15 years to pay off the tax debt and meanwhile I could invest in nothing else.

It was rumored that a friend had a $1.5million tax bill on options he had exercised. He apparently held onto his shares riding them down to about about $300K or so in value. Not sure how he resolved it (whether he negotiated his tax bill down with the IRS or came up with a payment plan).

Isn't this what bankruptcy is for?

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

#209

Post by sgt »

mcv wrote: post #205

If you had a job, you had a job. But if you lost the job, it could be really hard to find a new one. I lost my job and spent a year unemployed. And then the slump was over and I suddenly had 3 jobs to choose from.

Simple enough answer but true for many folks. Lots of jobs were kept and you'd just go about your business.

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

#210

Post by not_a_moth »

eru wrote: post #190
patio11 wrote: post #165

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 f…

Though quite a few of them have been Asians. ;) For most westerners considering a move to Asia, I'd recommend Singapore over Japan. It's essentially Asia-light, and salaries are higher.

Perhaps, but you're still lopping your SV salary in half, and if you want a central 1 BR that's not government housing, you're paying close to SF housing prices.
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