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

I've seen something similar to this in other responses in this thread, how exactly does one get a big tax bill for your stock options while simultaneously not being able to pay them off? I'm not understanding something about the situation.

Well I would get the government safety net which pays out a proportion of wages id just have to wait a couple of months so I wasn't risking much a few hundred.

But when one of your co-workers is a single mum who lives in rented accommodation and is buying her electricity on a Pay As you go electricity key losing a months wages is more serious.

I was working at a large firm (similar to HP), a the changes were gradual, but significant:

- Hubris blow-back: Non-managers with access to HR data within my own organization would query payroll data, and publicly say developers are overpaid. This was a US public firm, not a start-up, and our pay wasn't market leading.

- Domestic hiring froze. Existing offers were rescinded. No new offers made.

- Foreign hiring or visa workers started: The internet wasn't fast enough for outsourcing at first, so new developers were brought to the US Visa from India, getting paid quite a bit less, and living 5-6 guys to an apartment in the woods of New England.

- Terminations/layoffs: The first was a shock, then came the drain of twice a year, every year, eventually becoming the norm. At first, the less technically apt were release (those who learned to program because it was hiring.) Then some really good people, with good ideas and great degrees gone because they couldn't put in the hours or work in the environment, or because they couldn't set aside their pet project.

- Cost management, control, and reduction, everywhere. Need email? billed to your department. Need storage? billed by the MB. Need licensed software? Assemble a business case for a VP, and expect to have 4 tiers of reviews before that. Need a monitor or memory? Buy it yourself, that will never get approved. Have a shadow-IT lab where all your work gets done? Expect auditors to shut it down and claim the assets for the CIO. The correct department expense number is $0.

- Project control: strict waterfall, with systems engineering of everything. Regular metrics reporting with remediation plans to executives. This requires...

- Personnel tracking: hours worked per week were introduced, starting at 1900/year, then ratcheting up. 40 per week became 44, and then it was a whisper. Managers knew, plan your top people at 50-65/week or you would blow your budget. Those top-billers brought in revenue.

- Technical advancement evaporated. Development was for the outsourced teams; if you want to move up, learn how to manage lots of outsourced developers as a "project manager."

- Projects shifted. Latitude to explore new technologies and possibilities went away. Remaining client projects were purely driven by what was needed to keep businesses moving forward, like legal/regulatory requirements.

- Governance. To make sure there's consistency, and no shadow projects, control them through review boards for everything.

Consequences?

It became a grind. The long hours worked during the dot-com era exploring the possible and creating an internet that never existed before became long hours to meet project targets, billable targets, and client deadlines.....

Marriages suffered. People skipped family events for work. People skipped exams or even dropped out of advanced degrees, for work. You could see who was burned out, or was having trouble with depression, or was self medicating in other ways.

Professional lives suffered.

Not a good time.

I suspect that a lot of people here would be surprised at how many people have never even heard of a lot of the tech (or "tech") companies that are so prominent in industry's awareness.

One example. I saw a stat a month or so ago that something like 63% of Americans had never taken an Uber. I'm sure the vast majority have never heard of WeWork.

Yes, some of these companies are now public. But this isn't a matter of a whole industry having a major downturn. It's mostly companies that are well-known in some circles but are pretty inconsequential in the scheme of things.

One day it was all froth and then all of a sudden there was no work. I was lucky enough to have had enough money in the back to be able to spend the following two years studying, travelling and working on open-source software, and actually had a really good time that I look back on fondly, but I knew many people who had to switch from a very lucrative job at a startup to waiting tables and such.

Lesson: if you're making good money now, save (and if you then find yourself with nothing to do which pays, try to make the best of that time by doing interesting things that you would normally not have the time to do).