Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 419 posts

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

#381

Post by kevstev »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #379
kevstev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was very similar- I was working on my resume the morning of 9/11 at the start of my senior year. My friends and I all boasted about how we would refuse to even entertain any offers below 75k prior and several had already secured offers at the end of their summer internships. The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years…

It’s funny to hear stories like this, because I didn’t begin my career as a software dev and 37k would have seemed like incredible money to me fresh out of college in ‘06. My first job, I was making 21k and I felt pretty ok about it. I’m making an order of magnitude more now, but I’m grateful for learning how to be happy on a 21k salary. Literally everything over that feels like excess that I could do without if need…

That must have been in a LCOL area... 37k was not enough to move out of my parents house comfortably... 55k was, at least I could live with roommates and still save a bit- I was in NYC though.

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

#382

Post by IggleSniggle »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #361
Zaskoda wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cartoon if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dMFM-Jqji0

This just solved a huge mystery for me. One of my first managers I had after becoming a developer used to say, "Listen, if you don't get your stuff done, you're going to be having fudge stripes and pringles for breakfast, ok!?" All of us junior devs had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I always thought, "That doesn't sound too bad to me." It was actually a reference to this cartoon. Thanks for solving a 10…

For what’s its worth, it beats frickin workin

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

#383

Post by jen_h »

jjeaff wrote: post #365
mlyle wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it really depends on who your customers are. The amount of cash available during a recession doesn't change. It just gets more sluggish and people tend to be more reluctant to let it go. But it's there all the same.

I don't know if people tend to be more reluctant to let it go, they just change where it goes. As an example, a company I worked at during the dot.com crash made a lot of bones in regulatory compliance until 9/11...at which point, redundancy and high availability became the money machine.

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

#384

Post by palad1n »

elevenoh wrote: post #142
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 basically got stoned and played video games for the next 5 months. Did you find this 5 month period notably changed your life philosophy/trajectory?

Well, actually I stopped smoking pot after this, so in that sense at least the answer would be yes.

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

#385

Post by colek42 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #251
Havoc wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the boss/owner should be paid last Yup. My dad is big on that too. Always thought he overplayed it, but one day he explained that the people he employs are quite poor. So if they don't get paid they can't put food on the table - literally. While he has a bit more of a buffer.

Leaders Eat Last. A very good book by Simon Sinek but based on an old Marine Corps principal. While other services have 'head of line privileges' - basically the more senior you are the more you can cut in line to get food at chow time. In the Marines, you always line up most junior to more senior. It drives home the responsibility leaders have to take care of the people who follow them.

No US services have head of line privileges.

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

#386

Post by acdha »

Echoing a bunch of common responses: a lot of the crash and burns were reality catching up with wild expectations — we had business with pets.com and there were times where they had a room full of “technical” staff who had no idea how the web worked but were more or less openly counting down the days until they became rich. If you’re working somewhere where there isn’t a realistic plan for the numbers to work, that’s a good cue to reconsider your risk exposure.

That didn’t mean that people who were good didn’t also get hit, so there are two other points I’d consider: lots of the dotcom bubble workers spent money as quickly as they made it, often locking in fixed commitments like car payments or mortgages so they had only a short period of solvency if their income changed dramatically. Having reserves is a great peace of mind measure, as is knowing which expenses you could cut quickly if needed – especially if, say, you went from $$$ at a cool sexy company to $$ at a boring but stable job.

The other thing is considering correlated failures: if everyone around you works in the same industry, you’re going to be competing with them for jobs and unable to sell a house at a good price if the market sours broadly. That doesn't mean you should flee SV but you would want to be prepared to stay put for awhile with large reserves. Similarly, focusing your investments in the same field can end badly — here I’m thinking of a trend-following sales guy who got laid off and had to explain to his wife that he’d also put most of their savings into dotcom stocks which all tanked at the same time.

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

#387

Post by acdha »

digb wrote: post #330
ping_pong wrote: post #98

I worked through the tail end of the dotcom boom and saw all of the dot com bust. My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit cards just to stay alive. Entire techn…

Why do you think the outsourcing never got quite as bad as everyone expected?

Communications is a big factor: if you can’t make good software in house, adding a time delay and lack of business knowledge won’t help.

The savings are almost always overstated by a huge margin: people with equivalent skills charge more or move. Most of the sales pitches assumed you’d get good results at, say, 20% but don’t work when that’s really 85%.

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

#388

Post by Aeolun »

Notorious_BLT wrote: post #331
Aeolun wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if they’re not doing their jobs properly, but even if their company is sending pretty much all jobs off-shore they still need someone to verify the quality of the contributions from those people, and that’s where your job will be. Besides, my big company is starting to bring more and more jobs on-shore again after finding out that doing it all off-shore doesn’t actually work.

I work for a consulting company and any time we work alongside offshore developers (hired by the client to do parts of the work) its a nightmare. Maybe its just the clients being too price-sensitive and not knowing how to oversee offshore devs, but every time I've been in this situation, the offshore developers are slow to deliver, their quality of work is far below the standards of the team, and we end up spending t…

I think the problem is they have zero stake in developing a great system. If anything, a barely working kludge that they can maintain for the next few years is best.

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

#389

Post by throwaway87378 »

ping_pong wrote: post #98

I worked through the tail end of the dotcom boom and saw all of the dot com bust. My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit cards just to stay alive. Entire techn…

> Take into considering that while the wages for software engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now.

That is a common misconception when people do not take inflation and housing cost increases into account. $1USD today is worth only 65 cents in 1999 according to the consumer price index:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1USD+in+1999

CPI inflation is only 56%, but house prices in the Bay Area have risen 280%:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=median+house+price+san...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/22/median-price-tag-for-...

Tech worker salaries only seem high relative to salaries for other workers, because the tech worker salaries have not been falling in inflation/housing cost adjusted terms for the past 30 years. IMO computer programmers are, as a whole, grossly underpaid today, just not as underpaid as much as people in other lines of work.

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

#390

Post by throwaway87378 »

bdcravens wrote: post #367
sokoloff wrote: post #232

For me, the most crazy change was several stories in the early 2000s of running into (literally) used car salespeople who mentioned they were software devs for a while in 1999. They were hustling cars in 1997, hustling code in ‘98 and ‘99, and back to cars in 2001. I spent the crash in the financial industry which was hit in its own way: one fire-sold company office, one closed satellite office with a job transfer to…

> They were hustling cars in 1997, hustling code in ‘98 and ‘99, and back to cars in 2001. Hasn't changed that much, except now there's the in-between step of getting hustled by a boot-camp promising big $.

There were Visual Basic boot-camps during the dot-com boom.
Post reply on HN