You made it through by being versatile. Not by starting to learn while you were job hunting, but being prepared when jobs were aplenty.

You had to be ready to be employed in a non-VC funded world, doing boring things.

I liken it to today, where you have an abundance of 6-week boot camps and developers writing code against the sexy Javascript framework du jour. Those developers will starve if we hit another period where VC dries up.

Learn some boring stuff, even stuff that gets laughed at on HN. .NET. Java. In places like Houston, there's TONS of jobs, but they're not in Rails or Clojure or Angular. They're in .NET, writing apps for big oil or healthcare.

Though it wasn't as big then, I think learning dev-ops will really take someone far when no one's writing Twitter aggregators or social networks for quadcopters.

tl;dr When times are lean, boring languages in boring companies that make real, not VC, money is how you stay afloat

It was very different. At the dot-com's that I was at, web servers and application servers were Red Hat Linux, and only the databases were Sun boxes, with E4500 being a high end box. At a post-IPO dot-com there might be one E6500 and maybe a few Sun E4500's, and lots of Red Hat machines. At the investment bank they were all Solaris on the Unix side, and had dozens of E6500's in my city, and hundreds of E4500's. The investment bank had admins in the OpenBoot PROM all the time, whereas I had barely been in it. The investment bank was always replacing disks in the hundreds of external RAID arrays they had whereas only our database had a large external RAID array. They used NFS extensively and you had to know it thoroughly. My knowledge about Red Hat Linux, Apache web servers, Java application servers etc. didn't amount to much.

It was qualitatively (and quantitatively) very different, and in interviews it sounded like I didn't know what I was talking about.

On the developer side, the bureaucracy is very different. If a minor change in a software package is being pushed to New York, London and Tokyo, which often it is, you might have five meetings about it, and the code push might take weeks or even months. No matter how trivial the change. Three different divisions might have to sign off on the change. It's definitely not an agile code process, with code going from your fingers to the production web/app within the week.

Did you know that Open Firmware has its own theme song?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060111132138/http://playground...

http://everything2.com/title/The+Open+Firmware+Song

Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones"

    Firmware
    Open Firmware
    It's the appropriate technology,
    Features
    FCode booting
    Hierarchical DevInfo tree. 

    Hack Forth
    Using Emacs on the keys,
    Save in
    NVRAM if you please.
    With your
    Open Firmware
    You can fix the bugs in no time
    Bring the kernel up in no time
    We'll have an FCode time!

For production slated machines, we were usually running commands such as "copy-clock-tod-to-io-board", nothing too creative.

While I was there, the Sparcstation 20's reached end-of-life and we were allowed to bring one home (I still have it). At home I had gotten ADSL through a reseller that had an odd routing setup - they wanted the MAC address of my desktop so that they could assign an IP to it. I guess I should have gotten a hub that could do NAT, but I gave them my Intel PC MAC, and then went into the SS20 OBP and changed the MAC address to that of my PC. It worked too, both machines got ADSL. Actually what I wound up doing is doing NAT with the SS20, after I swapped out the PC ethernet card with a spare one lying around.

the whole devlop on a mac book when the actual production systems are linux makes me wince.

I did not stay in enterprise for long. I like mainframes, but I hate the culture of big companies. I next helped founding a university, and when tired by ivory tower, I left uni to fund a company to focus on machine learning for industrial applications.

So, most important advise from an old sack: stay flexible, and dont be surprised that old skills in solid technology might be worth good money at the moment when the hypes end.

That's what happened, and many of them then ended up as estate agents.

Last job involved C# and it was good, and dynamic (pun intended)

The pay was certainly not poverty level and the required skillset was pretty achievable.

Perspective is a funny thing. I started in the enterprise and was there through the bubble (excluding a brief stint at a startup). I then went on to found my own company some years later.

Anyway, it somehow never occured to me that people actually depend upon the startup ecosystem continuing to thrive, and would feel absent options without it. I mean, I guess it's obvious, but I suppose I just hadn't consciously considered that it really implies "startups as a career".

So, it's somewhat hilarious for me to read someone musing that maybe they should "learn enterprise".

I'm also not in SV or another startup hub. So, I'm sure it's partly cultural as well.

But, I'd say, yeah...get you some "enterprise" while you're there, especially if they're offering it for the same price. ;)

Glad you enjoyed my life story. Happy to share.

There's an entirely different philosophy out there from the startup "push code to production on your first day". That of (lowercase) solid engineering practices where production releases are major events that require lots of interactions, checks and planning. It teaches you an awful lot. Safety critical industries, and many financial companies after Knight Capital, are good places to learn this kind of discipline.

Keep in mind, besides the dot-com crash and then the sept 11th attacks, the real macro environment of the early 2000s was outsourcing. Everybody believed you could just hire a team in India or Russia for pennies on the dollar. It would take another 5+ years for that trend to reverse as companies recognized the challenges in moving their development resources off-shore.

As I stated, I responded to the off-shore movement by switching to a less-affected industry (aerospace/defense). Most "market corrections" really affect the most vulnerable segments of the job market: entry-level and near-retirement.

By the Spring things had definitely changed. First lots of hiring freezes and then offers to friends rescinded. (A few lucky ones got paid 50% to take a year off.) I think most of the offers I had were for projects that were likely killed since they didn't add anything to the top line. The did a round of layoffs where I was joining in the spring before I started. I remember anxiously waiting at my college apt to find out if I was unlucky. I wasn't affected, I believe primarily because I was "cheap" compared to the people making 2x or more than me they chose to let go.

I felt very fortunate to land on an interesting team doing real product development; others I know who graduated in 2002 had no option but the longer path through customer support / non-tech jobs for a little bit.

Not starting work in 1998, I've calculated, cost me me somewhere north of $250k in wages (over three years, this is Europe I'm talking about). It would have been exhausting but the company that hired me in 2000 would have hired me in 1998 and allowed me to work on my thesis on the side, and of course $250k would easily pay for a year's sabbatical afterward. Even better scenario would have been work until 2001, get fired with severance (usually not optional in Europe), then finish degree, miss the worst of the downturn.

Very frustrating to work among people who make double or triple you do just because of the time they were hired (this was a consultancy firm, more than relatively basic development skills were not required, or usually not even wanted). Very frustrating to come to the realization I finished my education at pretty much the worst time in 2 decades, and just how big the difference was with a more optimal choice of when to study.

Oh well, maybe the people in this thread are right, and I'll get the chance to get another (related) degree. Or maybe going for a full phd. I am planning to do that sometime in the future, definitely, I guess maybe it'll be next year.

It was terrible and the university was raising tuition each semester because of the decreasing state budget, weak endowment investment returns and alumni contributions. Some were going to wait out the job market by going to grad school, but didn't know how they were going to pay for it.

If you didn't have every single acronym in the job req and 5+ years of experience with each, the employers simply were not interested. Things like, you'd used Eclipse but not IntelliJ disqualified you because IntelliJ was requested. Some job reqs even requested more years of experience in some technology which had only been around for half the time mentioned.

Sending 100+ resumes a week without any callbacks became the norm. Recruiters could simply sit back and wait for the resumes to come to them. If you weren't actively looking, no one would call you.

Enterprise market was essentially the only game in town. Any kind of web dev just died overnight. I managed to start and finish a masters degree before things got better again.

For me, it was Websphere or Weblogic. I had worked with Oracle's enterprise Java stack & plain old J2EE. One interviewer asked me why I was even brought in for an interview.

I remember one that said "Websphere only. Don't even think about applying if you've used Weblogic!"

Some of all of it was in caps.

After a couple of months, I started cold-calling businesses as a consultant/freelancer - got my first gig at $20/hour, and then a more reasonable one at $55/hour, since then I've been passed around via word of mouth. I found that clients were more amenable to contracts than FTE because they all needed work "for now" but were petrified of commitment since they had no idea what the future would be like. Anyway, I stuck with freelancing and have never since taken a salaried job.

Basic advice - don't sacrifice your salary for stock options (unless you're a founder and already have enough emergency fund saved up to last you through another crash). Don't trust your "like a family" employer to take care of you, don't believe that HR has your best interests at heart. You're in business for you, not your employer - treat them well in exchange for them treating you fairly, but not out of some misplaced sense of "loyalty". The rest of it is just, save up and live simply - programmers aren't investment bankers.

One of the big challenges was that large companies were the only place to get hired - the few startups that were around were often zombies leftover from the dot-com times; it was clear they weren't going anyplace, and (perhaps exaggerating slightly here...) nobody was starting anything new. Keep in mind though a lot has changed in 15 years - it took a lot more capital for infrastructure in those days so there were fewer companies starting up anyway.

For people my age and older... we saw the pre-dot-com slowness of the early 90s, we got caught in the dot-com downturn, we got caught again in the post 9/11 downturn, then we saw our house values melt down in 2008... so as far as I'm concerned, in good times be painfully frugal and stash cash because the bad times are just around the corner...

I remember a friend getting me an interview at a finance company specializing in the growing subprime mortgage market. In hindsight, I'm glad that one didn't pan out.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Think-Pink-Slip-Layoff...

http://www.forbes.com/2000/11/29/1129pinkslip.html

About 40% of the twenty-somethings in SF moved out. SF itself was so dead that one day, at rush hour, I saw a completely empty street in downtown. I asked a cop if something was stopping traffic, and he said no, it had been like that for a few days. Many empty buildings in SOMA.

I had an automatic system predicting the death dates of publicly held dot-coms, based on their assets and cash flow. I keep it up for reference:

http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html

(Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", that means the company is so dead.)

Yes, there was a huge market through Y2K and the dot-com bubble for people who knew how to operate a keyboard, and that market collapsed. But those people where as much developers as I am a surgeon because I know how to apply a band-aid. Personally I was glad the bubble burst, because it became increasingly harder to avoid landing in a place where most of the "developers" weren't utterly incompetent.

HN isn't a representative audience though. Most of those people wouldn't be on the early 2000's equivalents of HN either. If this is a bubble and it bursts, most of HN-ers that get affected won't be out of work for more than a month.

Many may have to take a boring enterprise gig, but that's pretty much how the second wave of internet-companies started: bored and with time on their hands, many hackers started to work on what was then called "social software" projects, which eventually resulted in a wave of social media startups.

Things may be different in SV, especially when it comes to the balance of wages vs cost of living, but SV is an outlier.

When the crash happened, I started to get calls from developers who wouldn't take my calls a year earlier. Many had a few jobs within a short period of time. I remember placing one guy three times in two years due to closings.

Many recruiters couldn't generate enough revenue and subsequently left the market, which was actually a good thing because the market had become flooded and needed a purging. Salaries came down a bit, but candidates at this point would put very little value on stock options. Options went from being looked at as a large piece of the package to being considered the equivalent of lottery tickets.

To be insulated, I'd encourage you to try to become 'known' in your space. Those with solid reputations and networks were always employed, even if they bounced around a bit.

This boom is honestly (IMO) 1) more stable, as many companies actually do have business models and revenue and 2) more exciting (technology stacks are more interesting, tools have improved by leaps and bounds, very interesting companies are popping up.)

My advice is to be constantly learning (both theory and practice); watch trends and become familiar with where they are going (if an exciting new technology comes along, learn some of the basics, even if that's just a "hello world" equivalent - I don't recommend doing a deep dive of anything truly new unless it really blows your mind or you think it's going to become lucrative); try to generalize your skillset a bit - there's a tradeoff here of course, as specialists will often get paid more while the getting is good - but it means you'll never lack for work (and may get stuck with some more drudgery since you're the jack-of-all-trades, master of none.) I'd also recommend trying to get multiple income streams going, whether that's from your own services business, freelancing, or just software-related consulting, so that if/when the crash comes, you've already got your own personal safety net.

First one was a startup acquired by a big corporation in 2000, but they gave up on us a couple years later. How much the larger economic climate affected that, versus the indisputable fact that we were spending a lot more than we were making, I don't know.

Got another job before the severance ran out. Second one was a small startup, which ran out of cash and failed to make payroll a few months later. The owners wanted to keep going on a shoestring and offered me equity to stay, but I didn't want to take that gamble. Again, I can't say how much of that was due to the economy (harder to find investors in 2002 than in 2000), versus the fact that the company was spending money and not making any.

Got another job right away. This one was a profitable government contractor, I stayed there for years.

My first piece of advice is to always have current, marketable skills. You don't have to chase every trend, but you should know more than one thing, just in case that one thing becomes the next buggy whip.

My second piece of advice is not to put all your eggs into one basket. Salary is more reliable than equity. Savings will get you through rough times.

The main downside was that smaller companies kept going out of business (which is why I had so many jobs in that time period -- two of those companies disappeared entirely, one of them taking a month's worth of salary with it, which super-sucked).

A key thing, though, is that lots of really, really, really marginal developers got hired in the late '90s -- I worked with some of those at the first company that went out of business -- and they very possibly never got a job in the industry again. Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code.

I think they also took it as an excuse to suck even more at interviewing. Since the pile of applicants was practically endless, you could reject people for any damn reason, and nobody would call you on it. At one point somebody was telling me that their standard interview question was "draw me a house." And if they picked up the pen without asking follow-up questions, that was a no-hire. I think that was also around the time the manhole-cover questions started taking off.

I basically learned something I thought I knew - debt is bad. Really bad. We survived but it was only because we clamped down super hard and interest rates dropped.

When times are good, cut your debt so you owe nothing. Get some savings but once you have some savings pay off the debt.

I knew lots of people who were still employeed but were freaking out because the stock market was collapsing and they were overleveraged - they had borrowed against their home to buy stock.

When April 2000, hit everyone stopped watching their stocks shoot up to watching their stocks crash - same lack of work getting done but gloomier and more suicidal.

My advice to you is:

network, network, network - now before you need it.

Something that I find hard to do myself sometimes.

Then again I have been through a bunch of crashes/mini-crashes already.

But in 2000, you could not rent a Uhaul - they were all reserved for people leaving ahead of you.

Every boom time gets more and more selective here.

Tech is not a long term career move - the ageism will get you if the boom/bust doesn't. Plan for a life outside of tech if you can.

The froth is happening. I am betting on a crash somewhere around mid 2016. Stock market is looking frothy with the real economy doing nothing. .... just like in 1991, 2000, 2008

At the time the crash was just starting to happen, I interviewed at Sun for a job in the Java compiler group.

Their office was just off the De Anza and 280 exit in Cupertino. They told me how their neighbor Apple hadn't been doing well,and how they were gradually taking over all the office space near them. The folks I interviewed with thought Apple would be history in a few years, and being a hardware company that was doing well, they would deal with the crash just fine. I believed them.

Apple made a complete comeback. Sun went through many rounds of layoffs before it was swallowed by Oracle.

Luckily for me I ended up taking another job at a company that was one of the few to do relatively well during the crash.

Till this day I am grateful I did not take the Sun offer.

The next crash probably won't be cyclical in your city. The money will come back, but it will come back somewhere else.

If your priority is to stay in the city where you're living, be prepared to make that work (which means being flexible about what you do), or be prepared to move (which means being flexible about where you live, and being in a relationship where moving for work is OK).

And by "diversifying your skill set" I don't mean just being proficient in more than one area, but also being perceived as being proficient in more than one area. This is probably hard to do without switching jobs. You have to sell yourself as being "good at both A and B" during the interview and only then will the perception take root.

Incidentally, this was a double-edged sword for me, since peoples' perception of me being a designer (I had merely added a couple art samples to my resume) always seemed to pull my career in a less technical direction than I wanted to go, partly because I stayed at the same company so long.

The only area that was really hiring at the time was the Government, and I lived on the east coast so I was able to work for a Government contractor a few months after graduating. It took quite a bit longer for some of my friends to finally use their degree and some still never have.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to 'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new graduate.

Actually it felt great. Like a return to the basics.

Before: * Pay increases of 10-50% each year or two as you changed jobs. * Finding a job was a matter of sending your resume to 1 or 2 decent recruiters, then fielding the endless calls about opportunities. * High quality, challenging technical interviews from senior developers and engineers.

After: * No significant pay increases anymore. * Recruiters that never answered emails or calls (explained below). * Low quality interviews given by hiring managers, or in some cases by contractors with little experience of their own. * H1-B visas bringing in floods of people who largely could not solve problems and who needed to be given every solution just short of typing the code.

Prior to dot-com bust, recruiters were professionals who had a fair grasp of the technologies and industries they were involved in. They seemed to treat their jobs as actual professions rather than as temporary stepping stones to something else.

After the bust, companies reigned in their (perhaps overly aggressive) hiring and IT growth, leading to perhaps an over-abundance of recruiting firms. But at the same time, new recruiting firms emerged staffed by low (no) quality keyword-searching resume-pushing monkeys who would work for peanuts. Thus, the real recruiting firms cut staff so severely that the remaining few were buried under resumes of all the IT people displaced (let go).

Companies still had positions open, even advertising them, but hiring managers were very reluctant to actually fill those positions. Despite approvals to hire, nobody wanted to take the risk of actually spending the money on more staff.

This led to the growth in low skill H1-B labor, which further reduced the need for quality recruiters. It all became a game of numbers, a race to the lowest common denominator.

When that didn't produce positive results for industries, corporate management (who could count money but could not judge IT quality) made the next obvious step - offshoring. This further ruined the environment.

Basically there was an 8-10 year dark age in IT (unless perhaps you were in Silicon Valley... I can't speak for that). It still hasn't recovered fully, and it probably never will.

Your post-boom H1B claims are simply not true. The glut of H1B visas were available and used DURING the boom. For several years after 2000 the cap was not reached. In 2003 the cap was reduced to 65k (1998 levels). Your generalized claims about the quality level of H1B workers looks to be xenophobia (or worse).

In 1999/2000, H1B visas were much less flexible than they are today. People were beholden to their companies/jobs. Transferring to another job/company took 5 months. Holders had 10 days to leave the country after losing their jobs. Out-of-status one wasn't allowed to find a new job.

During the boom, enforcement of those last two things was not always strict, but afterwards it was. KICKING ALL THOSE PEOPLE OUT CAUSED THE OUTSOURCING BOOM. A well-educated workforce, familiar with the American corporate landscape, a business network in America, forced to move back, willing to apply their skills with the help of cheap local labor.

While ragging on those H1B holders, it is important to realize that THEY FILLED THE UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL SECURITY COFFERS without ever being allowed to collect (look up '40 social security credits').

I had left one gig and had started looking for the next one. One month I was getting multiple 6-figure full-time job offers. The next month the phone didn't ring.

I ended up going back to basics: marketing. I went through the online job boards and found which skills were still selling, then revised my resume to focus on those. I made my pitch better and started to talking to recruiters.

It's all still just a numbers game. There's a funnel of jobs you apply for. The next level is the recruiter interview, then the tech interview. Different rate quotes get different amounts of volume into the top of the funnel.

I ended up taking a 30% cut from my rate before. That went on for a few months, then the next job was back at my normal rate. In fact, the more I worked the market the better my rates got. I took a big hit for the several months it took to re-tool, but in general within a year or two I was doing as good or better than before. (The only exception is that the full-time job calls dried up.)

The rule of thumb here is that multi-skilled contractors can always find work as long as they have good marketing and sales skills. The guys who had been camping out at the same job for several years and not growing their skillset had the worst time of it.

Oh, and having a friend who is a very good engineer (ms cs from mit) take a job for $45k to put a dent in their mortgage.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010201083400/http://fuckedcomp...

Money was flying about in all directions and all you needed to do was stick your hand up and grab some of it. Your silly internet company would get $25 Million for the worst idea you could think of. If you'd read a "For Dummies" book, you could take your pick of $75/hr contracts or just grab as much $200/hr freelance work as you felt like. You could stick that surplus money into the market by picking any stock with an "e" in front of the name and watch it double in value every few weeks.

Then 2000 happened. And it went back to normal.

Normal.

Not a disaster. Not the end of the world. Just back to regular jobs for regular companies with regular business plans for regular developer wages. If you were good at what you did, you were fine. If you were a converted business major, you went to law school. No sweat.

Everybody (at least everybody I was aware of) saw it coming. We were in a bubble. Yahoo wasn't going to double a fifth time that year, so it probably wasn't a good idea to accept that 10x leverage your brokerage offered and dump your life savings into it. We still partied like it was 1999 (since it was), but we were all ready for the day when the party ended.

Then it did. And we went on with our lives.

We might just do the same thing in a year or two. And again, it probably won't be that big a deal.

> What were job-prospects like?

IIRC development went off a cliff. Even people who were in secure industries were at risk because of the deflation in salaries. IT/Operations was reasonably safe.

> How were your wages affected?

Roughly cut in half overall. Through the worst of it in two years then back to normal.

> Well-insulated if/when the next crash happens?

Aside from a good savings account. Don't be afraid to pick up a little ops experience. Most people I knew who sailed through the bubble spent a few years doing in-house work for some non-tech company. There is always work closer to the business side. When times are good it's all about wish fulfillment with new services/features etc... During a downturn it's ruthlessly about costs.

I can understand why it happened. No one was educated some guy would get millions of funding for nothing but hype and high tail it out of there. People had money and were just cramming into places that didn't have a plan. I could literally walk into a place and make an animated gif on a webpage and people would oooooo'.

When it crashed it was literally like a vacuum and we all lived our life like 'that' didn't happen.

1) There are industries like health care and insurance that have traditionally been good places to hang your hat during a downturn. If you can learn about regulations, trends, and domain-specific tech in those fields, you will always have a job.

2) Both in the dot-com era and more recently, there were loads of people who entered the industry because they saw dollar signs. If a downturn hits, many will be quickly weeded out because they won't have put in the hard work to round out their skills and portfolio, or thought about their long-term career progression. You can avoid being pruned by planning ahead and taking action now to make sure you've got solid credentials.

- where in your career you were - where in location you were - what kind of employer you had

Far and away the hardest hit during the last crash were new-grads who had accepted job offers that hadn't actually started yet. Those jobs immediately went away and there was nothing to replace them with. I know of lots of people who left tech in general after this, and others who constitute a "lost" generation that has always made less money/done less interesting things because of this. Everyone up the experience ladder did better in an almost exponential way. That is, junior devs either spent a lot of time unemployed or accepted jobs at salaries well below what they were expecting. More experienced devs ended up hunkering down in "boring" jobs and saw their wages stagnate for a few years etc.

SV and the west coast in general got hit much harder than the rest of the country. NYC, Chicago, Texas, Minneapolis, Atl, etc had down cycles but their diversified employer base meant that it was muted by comparison.

Besides the obvious dying of unsustainable startups and their employees, the people in tech. services were much more impacted than other industries. Particularly hard hit, were body shops and the big consultancies. Finance, insurance, pharma, etc all took much less of a hit.

I'd add that along with the dot com bubble, several other factors added in to make the last crash particularly brutal. Lots of enterprises used the 2000 bug scare as an excuse to retool and there was tons of work that went away after that ramped down. Then 9/11 came along and put a major hit on companies willingness to spend on infrastructure.

As far as being "well-insulated", there isn't much advice to give. These are macro factor trends that impact everyone. The advice for this is the same as for dealing with any risk. Keep your spend rate low, have a safety net, diversify your skill set and have a strong professional network that thinks highly of you.

I submitted 45 applications. I ended up with two interviews. It took me 4 months to get my first job. I was being paid about half of what I was making as a high schooler in 1998.

In the end it was one of those strange blessings. That company ended up being a fledgling Quickoffice which launched me into my startup career.

Still, it was quite tense at the time.

By the time I graduated in 2001 my cohort were taking jobs at Staples selling computers so there's that. Many people were getting into graduate programs to wait out the downturn. I am not sure how this affected minimum education standards for new hires down the road.

I did OK but there were some lean times.

I graduated from ArsDigita University in 2001. Right time, right place to see stuff completely implode. I must have sent 100+ resumes during 2001, and temped at Harvard for a while until getting a job through a friend in Feb 2002, in Java development. It wasn't great, so I kept up the job search and finally went to grad school in 2003 while finding a part-time consulting job, also in Java. That kept me afloat until I graduated in 2006, and moved out of the USA.

Looking back, the companies acted like they could do no wrong, and it bit them hard. ArsDigita was a dot-com darling for a while, but it did crazy things like sign ten-year leases for a branch office that could seat 20-30 people and they had 2-3 actual employees in that city.

I remember in ArsDigita University, we weren't based in the actual office but a place about a metro stop away (where ITA Software based themselves a decade later, yay lisp), in the basement. We started the program in September, and one day in March we were let into a larger, nicer office on the first floor and were told that AD also rented this part as well, anticipating another 20 or so programmers would work here as well. It remained empty until we moved out of the space later that year.

Actually, here's a copy http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

But you are right, that CEO was not the right guy for the job. His personality + Philip's no-bullshit attitude ended it.

My first east coast gigs were freelance work that I took from video production shops who got into the business of building websites during the boom because it was such a big money maker. After the crash they had laid off all the unqualified staff (random employees who learned dreamweaver and were therefore somehow qualified to build websites) and started scooping up people with actual technical education (me) for dirt cheap ($25/hr).

I moved to the Bay Area about 2003-2004 and the situation was a little better but I still had to look for work aggressively. Fulltime positions never were presented to me, though there were a lot of on-site freelance gigs out there so I didn't notice. I think companies were still wary of staffing up. I was getting paid what I thought were amazing rates at the time ($45/hr). Back when I was starting out I was always the youngest person on any team by a stretch. A lot of staff guys were 15 to 20 years older than me with a family and kids. Some were even older. Might have something to do with who they chose to lay off a few years before my time, but never asked.

Because of the freelance vs staff situation I basically never took a fulltime job and stayed freelance ever since. Though after I moved to LA I was offered staff jobs circa 2006 onwards and it started getting aggressive after that but I stuck to 1099's. I think a lot of guys who entered the market when I did went the same path.

I saw decent developers laid off, but good developers kept on. I saw companies desperately hunting for business (and signing ruinous contracts to have revenue). I saw promises to employees that had been made in exuberance broken (we'll open a London office). I saw poor business practices--lay offs the week of Thanksgiving, for example. I saw the business I was a part of get smaller and smaller as the fat was trimmed.

However, for good developers, there were still raises. I know some great people who were hired away, so I think that the job market still existed. But you certainly weren't getting the exuberant benefits in the new job.

I was too young to be on recruiters' radar, so I can't comment on that.

As far as insulating yourself, I think the best things you can do are:

   * be humble
   * learn new skills
   * be cognizant of the business and the value it provides to consumers, and where it is weak
   * know if the business is profitable, and how (1 big customer? 1,000,000 small ones? advertising) 
   * save a large chunk of your salary, and not just in your 401k
   * keep your network alive (maybe be an informal recruiter? http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1728 )

The market, at least in Dallas/Austin was barren. The only new job postings on job boards were repost by recruiters looking to pad their portfolios.

> How were your wages affected?

I keep lowering my expected hourly rate/salary weekly. When I got it down to 50% a recruiter called me back and got me something.

> Did recruiters simply cease to exist?

All the opportunistic, bad recruiters crawled back to whatever hole they came from. Same with all the unqualified "bandwagon programmers" who cashed on the bubble and gave all of us a bad reputation forcing hiring managers into brutal interviewing processes.

Recruiters were let go too, agencies closed or downsized. A few good ones remained.

> More to the point, what advice do you have for developers who want to be well-insulated if/when the next crash happens?

Well first, you got to have some sort of financial cushion and a plan to cut down expenses to the bone: the day I was laid of on 2001 I canceled my phone, cable, any other superfluous monthly expense. Also moved to smaller apartment as soon as I could. I knew it was going to be rough for a while.

Next is to know which industry to aim for: after 9/11 lots of money flowed to military contractors so I started aiming for that industry. I ended up programming for a company that provided services for the military until the market recovered.

The one desk with a person had a stack nearly 2 feet high of resumes. I spoke to her, and she said she just couldn't read all the resumes coming in, and she was also having to handle the client side (which meant endless calls to companies, trying to find open positions).

That's when I knew the old system (glory days) were over.

Absolutely dead.

I went on sabbatical in October 2000 to SE Asia to backpack for 6 months. When I left, my current company had an open return door for me in my position. I also had two other companies that I had been talking to about working for either of them when I got back.

When I got back in March, there were no jobs to be had. I had money in the bank though and didnt realize how bad it was. Six months after getting back we had a party where ~55 people showed up. All tech workers. Out of the 55, only 3 had jobs.

It wasnt for another 12 months that I found a job - falling back to my previous skill as an architectural drafter. Fortunately it was for a small design firm that was wanting to do more technical stuff - so we were designing datacenters, server rooms, corp stuff. It worked out well - but for 18 months it was really really really bad. I only survived because my family owned my condo and I had a roommate who paid me $750/month in rent which is what I lived on. I couldnt get unemployment because I voluntarily left for my trip - on which I spent almost all my savings.

The good developers I knew went into a holding pattern, sitting at whatever job they landed until things improved. It only took 2-3 years before the demand started to come back. At that point, there was another split, where the really good people went off to new jobs, and the less talented stayed in the same corporate jobs. This then left a few really good years to be working as a consultant, as the corporate teams had lost all their talent and needed help. The guys I know who rode that consulting wave have all since migrated into director or VP positions at consulting firms, and are doing quite well financially, even if they have sold their soul tot he corporate world.

Of course, not everyone went the consulting route. Many of us just stuck with coding, but found better places to do it, for better salaries. But most people my age (40s) have no interest in riding the startup wave again.

As for what I did during the crash — started my own web/usability company in 2000. Nothing to do with the crash (the company I left was successful and bought a few years later — would have made a lot more money if I'd stayed and waited for my stock to vest ;-) Just wanted to get out of management at the time.

Just because the VC / startup market was crashing and burning didn't mean that a whole stack of existing companies didn't want to get on the web at that time ;-)

From my perspective a lot of it depended on where you lived.

The folk I know who were working in the US at the time didn't really notice a lot of difference if they weren't in the valley or NYC. Because outside of those areas the crash didn't cause that large a change in the job market. In the UK (where I live) not a lot changed outside of London, and maybe Brighton.

If you were in SF or London though you were facing a lot of skilled people hitting the streets at roughly the same time. Which obviously drove wages down. For a time it was a employers market.

For me the biggest visible changes I saw were:

* on the bright side: far fewer idiots were hired

* on the dark side: far fewer newbies were hired and trained on the job

* I got fewer calls trying to poach me, and lower offers for London jobs

* I faced a lot of competition from other folk starting their own agencies after leaving a failing startup

The biggest problem was faced by complete newbies or folk still finding their feet — since there were far more experienced folk around in the job market. And they got hired first.

Advice for developers who want to insulate themselves:

* If you're working now save money. Money gives you options.

* Be good at your job.

* Understand how to communicate to third parties that you are good at your job.

* Stop thinking that all work outside of the non-VC funded world is dull an uninteresting. It isn't.

* Have connections outside of the startup echo chamber.

* Live, or be willing to move to, locations that aren't flooded by hundreds of people just like you.

Afterwords there was not much work for a short while until I took a 6 month development gig (writing a Sharepoint clone) for a company in India at a not very high consulting rate, but by the time I was done the job market was better for remote workers.

The thing that stands out to me the most about that period in time was how flat it was. No significant pay raises, no new hires, nobody leaving (where wasn't really anywhere decent to go). The team and the work fortunately stayed interesting.

Take that for what it's worth - I'm just one data point. Also, the last couple years have been too good to us in our industry, but I don't think it's anything like the absurdity of the late 90's, so I would be surprised if there was a crash that hit as hard.

Also, to echo what others here have said, we didn't know we had it so good until we suddenly didn't. If you're in your first job in a fabulously-funded tech startup with bizarro perks, brace yourself that it may not be normal. :) But appreciate it while you've got it!

I also remember a few times where I was interviewing tech writers, and they would beg me for the job - they had been out of work for 2-3 years.

I don't think it will get that bad if the current cycle bursts. There's a lot more tech companies out there that are making money, and even if/when the VC money dries up there will be some jobs.

One, there were just fewer jobs and yet a lot of people competing for them, so it was especially hard if you didn't have a strong resume. Second, remote work was uncommon so if you didn't already live in a tech hub city you were pretty screwed. Third, performing the hiring process via the internet was iffy. Going through the process back then often involved stuffing a printed resume into an envelope and mailing it somewhere along with a printed cover letter, then waiting for a return letter or a phone call (which will probably just go to your voicemail or answering machine).

Granted, the tech field was a little better but not much, and not universally.

Problem is, I think the words "IT support" and "academia" were offputting to future employers; possibly quite rightly, as I definitely picked up bad habits which were hard to shake off. (Working in a team, mentoring/pair programming, working together on the same version control repository? We never had enough staff for any kind of collaboration.)

I sometimes feel like I'm exactly the wrong age: a few months too young to vote in 1997; the government I didn't vote for brought in tuition fees in 1998 and my year was the first to pay them. Always interested in computers as a kid and had never thought about the money but when I started studying CS at the height of the boom everyone assumed I was in it to "get rich quick". Now I'm in my mid-30s and thinking about going back to university just as the government announces postgraduate funding for under-30s only.

So, geeks were given millions and felt like they had to impress the investors. So if the competition moved to a new office, they moved to even bigger ones. If the CEO was driving a Porsche, they got a Ferrari. So you could tell a tech startup was in a building by the multiple Porsches parked outside. The same principle applied after the crash - you could tell a tech startup is crashing due to the multiple people coming out with cardboard boxes. Every day another startup next to us did the cardboard box dance. Our turn came as well of course. My next job lasted 2 months as that company tanked as well, and as a new recruit I was first to be let go. Next company lasted a bit longer but at that time the city was changed. Before the crash I had to park my car at the other side of town and take a taxi to it when I needed it. After the crash I could park everywhere I wanted and at any time. After the crash I had periods between jobs that I couldn't find any work. At all, but I was lucky (and good enough) to ultimately get a good gig. During those dead periods though I had to leave the City which was probably the hardest thing for me as I really like San Francisco.

I don't regret a thing though. And I think the crash ultimately did good to the industry. It was too much before it happened. A strange gold rush with a total lack of common sense. The waves to follow are somewhat more sensible.

Later I went on to finish a masters degree in computer science and have two more kids.

Besides that, I never really noticed the crash. Hiring was just as difficult since the average unemployed web dev didn't do C++ and machine control, so the glut of developers didn't really help us.

Now, while it was terrible for B2C, government consulting was booming. It wasn't the sexiest of work, but it was a good four years of my life.

I just wonder what would have happened if I could have grabbed the money and then go to school during the crash instead... Perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference.

Around April 2001, pink slip parties were still happening, but people were getting nervous. VC funding had completely shut off, I think.

Late December 2001, 2nd and Folsom -- tumbleweeds and homeless people.

Recruiters went from being suckups to being sorta mean. They never liked us in the first place. Interviews became brutal. The best way to survive was learning a little business and knowing the difference between a cost and a revenue center.

2008-9 was actually worse... that was the first decline in revenues and it combined with changing climate toward outsourcing with our government clients.

In US companies; this shift looks good on the balance sheets and helps stock prices. Because employee cost is a different line item than consultant costs.

I believe the economy is picking up when my business takes a hit.

[All said with the caveat that my interpretation of events could be completely wrong]

At one point you see these things, pink slip parties.. fascinating stuff. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pink-slip-party.asp

Anyway, we're not in a bubble, so don't worry. :)

Also, the "dot com bubble" makes it sound like it happened all of the sudden. Lots of smart people thought things were fishy by 1998. By 2000 everyone was convinced. Just because some people are talking bubble now doesn't mean things are going to fall apart next month. Make hay while the sun shines. And be careful about car leases and mortgages.

1999: "The dot-com lifestyle", everyone is an HTML/Flash developer. 2005: Flipping houses, adjustable mortgages - Mini Donald Trumps abound.

2015 seems to be lining up to be an energy industry crash.

Get in, while the gettin's good

I was dumb, had a couple of options to jump ship from the place that laid me off, and I didn't take them as I was insistent on moving to NM where my girlfriend was in grad school.

Shoulda stayed in the Bay Area. Rule of thumb: if something smells fishy about your current job: start looking asap.

For example, a job posting looked something like 'Five to seven years of experience building hospitality services using Java Servlets and Oracle Databases.' They would get dozens of qualified resumes and could hire someone for significantly less their previous salary.

In a way it was good, as when I went back, I no longer did java.

(Edit): 6 months unsuccessful job hunting for dev roles, then after money ran out, back to home town and living in a place my mother owned and taking any job I could.

So...yeah.... if people like that were getting top salaries, then things were a bit crazy.

That job search took months. Without a degree or professional experience, I didn't hear back from anyone. Which really stunk, because back then you had to fax your resume and my local Kinko's charged something like a buck a page. I was stocking the sci-fi section at Borders and reading computer books at night.

There was nothing like today's open source community, no sites like Github. It you couldn't point to a commercial product you built, you had no business claiming you could program. Recruiters wouldn't even talk to me.

I got a job at a company that hired pretty much anyone and sent them to a two-week BASIC course and made them web programmers. Literally, the guy who sat next to me drove limos and had zero exposure to programming before taking the job. But they could bill for his time by the hour, so...great! You can read a bit about my story and the technologies I worked with there in my three-part blog series "Pick is a living fossil of computer history" https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/a-living-fossil-of-compute...

Once I took that job doing Pick, I heard from recruiters at least once a week...for Pick jobs. Again, unless you had a job with a certain technology, you couldn't get a job with that technology, because there were 20 other people with more experience willing to work for the same crappy entry-level wages.

The early 2000s were much the same until I dropped $1000 of my own money on a Java certification and suddenly I was getting calls about Java positions all day long.

My advice? I hate telling people to build up a Github profile because not everyone has the luxury of coding in their spare time. But that's one of the most visible things you can do to prove your knowledge of different technologies. Be glad you have it, and use the heck out of it.

Save up money so you can go for months without a programmer's salary. You might need to.

Accept that you might have to take a job that's not very interesting of glamorous. But never take a job in a technology as old as your parents.

I did what's now called DevOps, automating server and code deployment, monitoring, etc. I could do no wrong. Got promoted, ran a team before I could buy a drink. Got treated like a rockstar with every role I chose to take. People needed to scale and I knew how to do it without hiring a room full of network admins. Serious stock options. My compensation felt like it was following Moore's Law.

The startup I worked at failed. My friends, colleagues, former managers, almost entire network all got kicked to the curb around the same time. Recruiters dropped off the face of the earth. There was no one out there to reach out to.

I collected unemployment for a few months.

I ended up taking a basic IT admin job for a drug trial company at about 60% my salary. A friend of mine landed at a small business Windows IT consulting shop with a bonus structure I could kill, so I interviewed there. I ended up as a local field engineer driving around to different small business clients fixing windows desktops and printers, but with an extra hours bonus structure that had me back up to my previous salary in a couple of years.

In short, I went from a Unix/Linux rockstar to Windows network guy. Now I own my own language learning business and I'm back doing part time DevOps consulting (what's old is new again). I bill out at $225/hr because people want to scale again. It's nuts because just a few short years ago there wasn't a company on this earth that would touch me for $30/hr.

How does it relate to now? I just spent the past two weeks consulting at a couple of startups, including directly for a startup accelerator and wow, yeah. It's the same vibe.

I got back on my feet. Most of my friends did too. I had to fix Windows XP desktops for pipe supply companies and law firms for a while. I had to launch my own non-sexy business to really get out of it. Now my tech skill set and interest happened to be popular again, so I'm taking advantage of that and doing some consulting. I don't expect the tech stuff to last, so I prefer to look at my own small language business as my long-term gig. I don't trust this.

My advice... Industries go through ups and downs, so you will experience it at some point. I survived by becoming OK with helping businesses outside of the bubble. I built my own more or less non-tech business on the side that grew to where I can live off of that if I need to. I advise maintaining a good network across several industries. If the tech startups bubble pops, you can write code for industrial robot control panels or billing systems. Network in industries outside your comfort zone. My sister-in-law wrote systems on contract for a hotel. A friend of mine works on enterprise tax software for Mexican companies. If the bubble pops, have a diverse network to reach out to. The front door's going to be jammed with resumes from people like you, all at once.

http://www.quora.com/What-was-Silicon-Valley-like-after-the-...

Thanks!

Believe me that can change. In a heartbeat. February 2000 and February 2002 were like night and day. BSCS's become much more important as opposed to just experience. You will see more "BSCS required" in ads. Networking - people who stayed in touch with former coworkers etc. came out ahead.

My career started in 1996. I had very little college, but knew Unix decently enough to be a sysadmin. I started at a small ISP, followed by a dot-com startup, followed by another dot-com startup which I was at in 2000.

I thought technology stock price/earnings ratios were at historic highs in early 2000 and was expecting a correction. I expected the crash, although it was bigger and longer than I expected. I thought getting some Fortune 500 experience on my resume would be a good idea. By the end of the year I was employed at a consulting company that placed me as a Unix sysadmin at a Fortune 100 financial company. Actually within a few months the company laid off internal staff and told the consulting company (which was pretty integrated into the staff) that they wanted some consultants cut, which I (barely) survived.

One mantra of our large consulting company is we never had to worry about the next assignment and money, but that was not true. During good times, they made the lion's share of the consulting fees, during bad times they fired anyone who could not be placed almost immediately. So the security they promised did not exist. I had time clocked in at a good placement though so I was safe.

I also had my own startup side project which I killed when the stock market crashed. It was kind of like a Geocities for video games. It had begun to get traction. It was very dependent on disk space, and I had been thinking of spending tens of thousands of dollars of my own money, not just on some servers but on disk arrays. Happily I never bought them. I went with the times - more focused on traction and "eyeballs" than revenue (although I made some revenue from beyond.com which sold software online, it was a public company whose shares went from over $600 to less than $1 and then bankruptcy).

Nowadays my efforts are more focused on bootstrapping and getting revenue early. It's worth it for an angel or VC to goad you on to spending money and chasing traction. They have dozens of bets and only need a few to pay off, you on the other hand might waste years of your life. I spent little money (colo'd at my old ISP), and a year of time, and learned programming etc. better so it wasn't bad.

I visited the Bay Area in late 2000 and had a job offer also, luckily for me I did not pack up and move there.

In terms of insulation: * A BSCS helps * Having lots of money saved helps * Money saved does not mean 95% invested in Rackspace stock, since stocks can go down as well as up * Keeping in contact with former coworkers helps * Having some clean, well architected, "Code Complete" proper code on Github helps * Having a side income from your own personal web sites, apps etc. helps

Another thing - right now the Bay Area is hot and other US cities are not as much. But from what I heard from friends, things were bad in the Bay Area in 2000-2001, whereas in LA, New York, Chicago, Boston, DC etc., they were not hit as hard by the tech crash.

Also, some people I knew were buying tech stocks on the margin in 2000 or even options (10% margin). They lost a lot. Also, unemployed people can eat through their savings very quickly. But there is no better insulation than having a lot of money saved up.

I was a Windows developer at the time and I remember a co-worker of mine left to join a startup and make it big. He started work at 8am, was downsized by 2pm and the company shut-down 2 days later. I worked with another guy who was going back to school for a certification, one of those early for profit schools, they had apparently invested much of their profit and when the market crashed, simply fired everybody in the middle of a semester, locked the doors and walked away.

Many of my peers moved back in with their parents and for lack of a job, simply went back to school and got their M.S.'s hoping to ride it out. I know a number of people who left the field entirely and started all kinds of random businesses: personalized woodburnt gift "cards", home-made chocolates, etc.

The company I worked for ended up simply running out of money, nobody had liquid capital to do anything like buy things or be our customer. We simply stopped getting paid.

I left, and through some connections, found a paid internship in a different career to make ends meet, on weekends I refurbished people's decks and delivered rides to kids' birthday parties. Through a twist of fate, my wife was in a weird immigration status and couldn't work (in those days you needed a work authorization card while waiting for your green card and the government was way behind in keeping them up-to-date). We were literally eating Ramen and Taco Bell for most of our food. I grew up pretty poor so it wasn't too much of a downslope, but it was pretty distressing for my wife. One pay period, my wife accidentally threw away my pay check in the trash, we wouldn't have been able to make rent and would have ended up homeless if I hadn't gotten my company to void it and issue me a new one.

Then 9/11 hit and things got worse. Immigration processes absolutely ground to a halt. My wife lost a job she had been able to get on her work authorization papers when they expired and the Immigration service forgot to issue her a new one. I remember an exorbitant anniversary dinner we went to at Olive Garden. We saved up for 2 months for it. It cost about $35 for the two of us. We asked for another basket of all you can eat breadsticks and a pasta refill then took the entire basket and all the pasta home with us so we could split it on another meal.

The place I was working at was delighted with me, and as a reward offered me another paid internship. Nonplussed with their generous offer, I applied to something like 300 other open positions, but the requirements had become insane: 5-7 years experience in fields that hadn't even existed 2 years prior, for entry-level positions paying less than I was making at my internship! I stayed at my internship. When it expired they offered to convert me to full-time at the same rate, but with benefits now being taken out I was bringing home less money!

It was about this time that lots of the courtesy in the hiring process disappeared, things like calling back applicants to let them know their application had been reviewed but they had decided to go another direction, that sort of thing, simply stopped.

On top of all of this, outsourcing was becoming a thing, and tons of jobs were moving to India. Many major employers simply stopped hiring or fired all their technical staff and moved everything overseas. For most of them, it didn't really work out, but it had a major impact in the number of openings and the requirements for the openings. You literally didn't know if your job would exist from one-week to the next.

For me, things started to turn around some time in 2003-2004. My wife finally was able to work after getting her Green Card, my internship converted into a full-time position with better pay, cost to borrow money was stupid low (at the time) with bizarre favorable finance rules (that later got the country in trouble) and we bought a house and started building equity.

The housing market became insane and we sold our house, 2 years after buying it, for a 40% profit. In the meanwhile both of our careers had turn into actual careers and not desperate grabbing at scraps. Outsourcing started to show major weaknesses.

A lot of the excesses of the dot-com bubble and pre 9-11 were carefully scrutinized. Dumb shit like starting a company and spending half the investment money on lava lamps were understood to be a bad thing now. Actually needing a business plan became important. It stopped being possible for 19 year olds with 2 years of experience and a 9 page resume made up of fabrications to get hired into mature startups as directors of engineering and paid $200k salaries. Perl started to fall out of favor as a major force in the development of the Web and Java shops started to become a major "thing".

Think also about Paul Graham. Y Combinator is a case of him monetizing a reputation that he earned (and, yes, he actually earned it) by standing up for startups in the depths of winter. I, for one, plan on making a strong and vocal case for Real Technology (it shall rise again) after the Snapchat/Clinkle frivolity blows up and humiliates the current cool kids. Being able to explain why shit went to hell ca. 2017, as it will, is going to help us make a case for building something better in the next iteration.

That said, it was a bad time for entry-level salaries, and graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05. If you had a $60k offer (that'd be $72k today) you were in the top third of CS graduates, and non-STEM graduates were lucky to see $40k. I'd guess that the more experienced engineers didn't see a massive salary drop (maybe 10-20% at worst) but it wasn't a good time for job hopping. Certainly that feeling that one could get a 20% raise, just by walking across the street, died out.

It was a good labor market for finance because there was a lot of cheap talent. First-year Goldman Sachs analysts were only in the $60-65k range. (Bonuses could be 50-100%, but they were also working 60-110 hours per week.) Undergrad quants (that's rare but the positions exist) were generally getting $80-90k offers.

People expected housing prices to come down, but they didn't decline by much because there was this other bubble that was building at the same time...

This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and heard lots of crazy stories from programs about high applicant numbers and quality. I ended up at a "hidden gem" versus a top program. A couple years later I re-applied to PhD programs and got accepted everywhere.

In today's markets it's a little hard to believe that people would be flocking to grad school due to a poor industry market, but it seemed to be the case across science and engineering fields. I'm sure that influx also made the bad academic job market even worse, unfortunately.

Like today, salaries in the Valley were about 2x salaries elsewhere. In the Midwest, I saw entry level devs getting $25-30k until 2002 or 2003.