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

It was wild.

Around 1999, I interviewed for my first proper tech job. I had no commercial experience. For the interview I had to drink vodka with the guy interviewing me and shoot some shit. The interview ended when he fell off the chair. I got the job: decent salary, stock options, really nice office.

Hardly anyone there knew what they were doing. That was good for me because I got to pick whatever tech I wanted (open source over the in-house Microsoft stuff). The software and our management processes were a mess. But that didn't matter, because the company was a dotcom darling. I think we charged one large client $1m to make an online store. It sold about 10 products, if I remember correctly. Most of our websites didn't really work very well, though they tended to look pretty nice.

There was plenty of daytime drinking, and drugs and parties. Not long before the crash, several thousand employees were flown to Vegas from all over the world. Lots of partying, cocktails in the pool, mixed in with some bizarre team-building workshops. For the finale, a specially-built circular auditorium with techno music pumping and spotlights whirling, into which the CEO himself drove on an electric scooter to the wild cheers of the crowd, pumping his fist and going round and round in circles.

I found it utterly demotivating to be involved in doing such a bad job of making such overpriced websites, all to the sound track of masturbatory, content-free self-promotion. I left shortly afterwards. It is interesting to me that a number of alumni have gone on to successfully make their millions in their own startups.

P.S. Before my stock options vested they were worth well over $100k. By the time they vested I got $7k.

This is how the first dot-com ended for me, including a few jobs prior, because I feel the setup is important.

I out of college I started a company with some friends from high-school, worked that for 6 months, but wasn't making any money, so I got a job at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. I worked there for over a year, but hated suburbia (back then Seattle didn't have many people who lived downtown, and pre-restaurant scene, etc, so I left for a good consulting job on the east coast and proceeded to spend the next 1.5 years traveling a lot, mostly to Chicago, but some NY. It was a fun lifestyle for a young hot-shot C++ guy. Then one of my co-workers quit to start a Startup and I was employee number 4 or so. Back then the stock market was starting to go wild. We competed against (and valued our company) like one called Vertical Net [1], we were exuberant and cocky. My friends were at companies like SilkNet, which got acquired Kana, all my social circle (25 to 26 year oldish) were involved with high-flying startups and we thought we were all going to be so rich. We even started playing the options market, one of our favorites was Nokia and Yahoo options trades. One of my co-workers made so much trading options in a week, that he cashed out and went and bought an Audi S4. We were all making fun of him (but the joke was on those of us who continued to play).

Anyway, after a year at that startup, I moved to another high-flying one across the river in Cambridge, MA. I only a contractor at this one, but the money was insane (it's actually taken me about 15 years to get back to the same money I was making there). Anyway, I think it was November 2000, we suddenly had some lay-offs announced. They didn't get rid of us right away, though, they kept the contractors o until the end of the year. But no biggie, I found another job immediately for a company called ATG. I was going to start at ATG [2] in February 2001 as a sales engineer. So, in the meantime, I took off for Europe for six weeks. And proceeded to have the time of my life, looking forward to my next job. At one point in Paris, I almost bought a Picasso "sketching" for like 10K US, but instead settled for a more modest $700 artist by a Japanese etcher that I liked way more. The next part of the trip, I blew out my ACL skiing in Chamonoix, and then headed back to the US to await starting my new job.

So, about two days before I was supposed to start the job, I got a call from ATG that they're having lay-offs and that I'm not to show up for work on the following Monday. Crap. No, biggie, I've always found tons of work. So, I put my feeler's out, and even contacted places that had made me offers in December 2000, but no go. Hiring freezes everywhere.

In June, I finally found some contract work at Staples.Com where I worked for about 6 months. 9/11 happened in September, and by December I was no longer at Staples.Com.

I couldn't find work for about 8 months after that. And then I ended up working for the State of MA in the Department of Revenue working on software for collecting child support in the Fall of 2002. I had gone from a high-flying C++ coder making $90/hour+ down to making $33/hour (working with Visual Basic and ASP). Then about two months into the DOR job, the recruiting company called and said they could only pay me $22/hour.

I didn't really get back on my feet fully until I started another job in January 2004 at another consulting company (now as a Java/C# engineer), and it was still for about half of what I made during the dot-com boom. And then from there I slowly crawled my career back.

In the meantime, most of my friends went back to school, because attorneys, eye-doctors (New England College of Optometry), one became a psychologist, the ones who stayed in tech moved into sales-side. There's only two of us who are still practicing engineers (and I'm 90% on the management side this days).

It was a long road back for me, but I always loved technology. Part of that road back was writing and publishing with Wiley a tech book, doing some more consulting, starting a couple businesses, failing a couple businesses, going through a nasty acquisition, and then finding a dream job again.

If you've read this far, I'll sum it with a couple of fun antidotes: remember that company I started with friends out of college? They sold a couple years later to Amazon for about $30M. Remember the guy who bought the Audi S4 with the options profits? The rest of us eventually pissed all our profits away in poor trades as the market was collapsing. He at least got an S4 out of it :). I still have some regrets about leaving Microsoft, I was working on an awesome team there, and financially (if I could have survived the moral of the Balmer days), I'd have been way better off (and I doubt I would be been cut during the grim times). But I've had a lot of good times with my travels and seen a lot more of the world because I left that job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VerticalNet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Technology_Group

> working for a company with large corporate clients in conservative industries, the crash had basically no impact at all.

Exactly, if there is a new crash it'll affect BS startups. aka: if your company is working on a BS service, isn't profitable after X years and is only able to survive due to investors initial $$$ you're in a bad place, including companies with a proper product but an oversized engineering team. If you're working on a real/profitable product in a healthy company/market you'won't feel a thing.

uber, snapchat, wework &c.

I had been a freelance consultant for about ten years, working through headhunters and by word of mouth.

Around April 2002 my contract was not renewed and I spent four months unable to find one. The freelance contract market seemed to dry up.

I had to go work as a full time employee for less than half the pay in Montréal (I live in Toronto). I commuted five hours by train each weekend for a year.

Ironically, the crappy company that hired me referred to me as a 'consultant'.

My hours went towards implementing KYC regulation for a big American bank.

The upside is that I got to live and work in French among my people for a while (I am French Canadian).

Unions generally work for those who have been there the longest. The young workers don't like hour cuts when they see people who have been there for years not have to take the same cuts. Worse, when you are young it is harder to have the required savings in place. My bank won't accept a lesser house payment - if I have been there for 10 years inflation has indirectly made my house payment less so I can afford to live on less income, which benefits the older worker over the younger. (there are lots of bills in life, some do hit older workers more and I'm intentionally not talking about them)