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

They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing requirements of the clients.

Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised canteen.

One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store. We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.

One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev, what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.

I left soon after that.

Edit: Since this apparently does not go without saying, the feedback loops in a union are all wrong for taking that kind of risk (remember, the pay cut does not guarantee company survival). People willing to rock the boat with calculated gambles like that do not rise to positions of authority in a union.

Lucent (AT&T spun them off to commercialize things from Bell Labs) had the absolute best product of the late 90s/early 2000: the Ascend MAX DSLAM/modem bank. Before that, an ISP needed T1 phone lines (24 channels) plugged into a CSU plugged into 24 modems plugged into a chassis that would emit serial that would be plugged into a router, along with a server that would do authentication and logging for billing and IP assignment. The Ascend MAX turned all of that into one box: phone connections to ethernet and all services provided and remotely administrated. Insanely great.

The problem was that Lucent's salespeople were very good, and the market for new ISPs was huge -- everybody was starting one or expanding their available markets -- so Lucent started offering financing.

When you finance your house or car, your loan is backed by the asset: the house or car still has some large percentage of the loan value at any given time, even with depreciation.

When you finance your ISP equipment purchase, Lucent assumed that they could always repo the MAX and sell it at a discount to some other growing ISP.

They didn't count on the ISP market collapsing.

But a couple key things change (many more do too these are two I look for), yes capital is harder to come by, or at least requires better fundamentals and connections but the overall market is in a selling mood (e.g. good buying market). So enterprises and healthy businesses are looking for things to buy on the cheap (which is relative to the high of the market), and how to expand cost effectively. There is of course a cool down period that you have to get through before this starts happening.

Enterprises after they snap up their initial FTE roles they need to fill start looking for a lot more consultants to fill project roles versus bringing on more FTE's. This opens up more consulting gigs at pretty favorable pricing usually. You can now hire people to expand a consulting practice because people are less expensive so you can grow when things are "down" for others.

When the air pops out of the system people also get discouraged from the market and run away. A lot of the speculators will back out and so it becomes a more sane environment for a few years. If you are a developer and just work through it as things recover you change jobs a couple of times and you can really jump your salary during the recovery because there is a time when demand becomes super high but supply again is low. This also is again where it is awesome to be a consultant, I kept increasing the rates for my company all through the downturn and people would pay.

Outside of tech a downturn is usually time to capitalize on real estate, rentals and a host of other things. But you have to set yourself up to do this usually a little before things take a full slide into that first year. But if you are relatively debt free and can take some debt on during the down point of the market on real estate you can make a lot of money on the upswing. To be clear, real estate may not crash at the same time or rate, or may not at all. But the demands for rentals vs buying changes as does the buying power of people, so you can leverage those both.