What was it like programming throughout the 2001 crash (from ex-FANG, DeFi dev)?
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I had a little script on my .bash_profile which computed the value of my RNWK options. It went up... up... up... half a milllion, a million, $1.5M!? I was thinking about retirement - at age 24, while making $65K/year! Then my imaginary fortune evaporated, all in a day or two, and that was that. (I have been skeptical of all non-salary-based compensation ever since.)
I was fine; I could smell the layoffs coming, but I hated my job anyway, so I found a different job working on some non-internet-based software that was right up my alley, and that worked out well for many years after.
At one point the following year I estimated that fully a third of my friends were out of work. Programmers mostly survived, but there were lots of designers, testers, and admins living on unemployment for a while. My wife lost her job, too, when her startup lost its funding; she went back to school.
I was fine; I could smell the layoffs coming, but I hated my job anyway, so I found a different job working on some non-internet-based software that was right up my alley, and that worked out well for many years after.
At one point the following year I estimated that fully a third of my friends were out of work. Programmers mostly survived, but there were lots of designers, testers, and admins living on unemployment for a while. My wife lost her job, too, when her startup lost its funding; she went back to school.
Graduated about 9 months before 2001 crash. Was lucky to keep job but it was tough watching a nice company meltdown. Layoffs down to skeleton crews, grown men near tears when their phone rang thinking it was a layoff notice, young folks who were leveraged way over their heads in debt or stocks.
Overall it worked out okay but really affected the way I save and spend over the past 20 years. Really not comfortable with the amount of debt and leverage people around me take on.
Overall it worked out okay but really affected the way I save and spend over the past 20 years. Really not comfortable with the amount of debt and leverage people around me take on.
I worked in consulting and my company was largely unaffected. We had clients in traditional businesses unrelated to the dotcom boom. But I know people who got laid off, particularly from March First, and a lot of people that got into the industry with boot camp training got out and moved on to other things.
Thousands of people were let go I worked in Pizza Hut yes that Pizza Hut for 2 years doing some odd jobs eventually found a technical position 3 years later. Life was much tougher then kids.
I can imagine that technical jobs were not as pervasive in non-technical fields making it much harder back then. Now nearly every corporation has a technical team, seems like a major advantage.
As Žižek teaches us: "History happens first as tragedy, then as farce".
After the DotCom crash -- never mind the evaporating stock options; a lot of people got hit hard by the layoffs, and base salaries weren't nearly as above-median as they are now. And when they got thrown out on the street, a lot of people were out of work for a long time, and some dropped out of the industry altogether (at least for a year or two).
Also, even if they didn't necessarily believe they were on a "rocket ship" (that term didn't actually come into much later), the general belief at the time was that tech was "fun" and "cool" and somehow ... different from the regular corporate grind.
So when the inevitable correction came -- it was a genuinely bruising experience, both financially and psychologically for a lot of people.
As for whatever corrections is coming our way for the current boom ... I think the difference now is that people are a lot more skeptical and detached -- both from the knowledge of what happened after the last boom, and from just being fatigued with tech in general. So I get these sense that people are (1) more or less expecting a correction to happen, and (2) are thinking "Whatever, F-it, I was just in it for the unreasonably fat paycheck (earned while sitting around in my underwear most of the day) anyway".
Except all the people who went long on crypto (long after they missed the party, and everyone else got rich). For them it's their first honeymoon, and some of them are going to be seriously upset and confused when they don't get their life savings back. "But Matt Damon said ..."
That's my hunch anyway. But what do I know.
After the DotCom crash -- never mind the evaporating stock options; a lot of people got hit hard by the layoffs, and base salaries weren't nearly as above-median as they are now. And when they got thrown out on the street, a lot of people were out of work for a long time, and some dropped out of the industry altogether (at least for a year or two).
Also, even if they didn't necessarily believe they were on a "rocket ship" (that term didn't actually come into much later), the general belief at the time was that tech was "fun" and "cool" and somehow ... different from the regular corporate grind.
So when the inevitable correction came -- it was a genuinely bruising experience, both financially and psychologically for a lot of people.
As for whatever corrections is coming our way for the current boom ... I think the difference now is that people are a lot more skeptical and detached -- both from the knowledge of what happened after the last boom, and from just being fatigued with tech in general. So I get these sense that people are (1) more or less expecting a correction to happen, and (2) are thinking "Whatever, F-it, I was just in it for the unreasonably fat paycheck (earned while sitting around in my underwear most of the day) anyway".
Except all the people who went long on crypto (long after they missed the party, and everyone else got rich). For them it's their first honeymoon, and some of them are going to be seriously upset and confused when they don't get their life savings back. "But Matt Damon said ..."
That's my hunch anyway. But what do I know.
I cut loose in December 2000 because I was fed up of the systematic bullshit of management failing to accept reality, and my cousin was getting married abroad in January so a great opportunity to travel presented itself.
The company was managed by capricious, get-rich-quick types that kept making us perform dumb stunts and acting in really terrible promotional videos rather than finding customers. I didn’t exactly see the crash coming but I knew I wanted out. I think the trigger was the owner saying in total seriousness, “Red Herring is my Bible,” clutching a copy of the magazine. Who remembers Red Herring?
What a time to be alive.
When I got back in March from a great trip the company had totally imploded and sacked almost everyone but were pretending that everyone still worked there when I popped in to say hi to my friends/team - ‘out to lunch’.
I had a bit of hassle getting back into work, took me about three months I think to land a decent gig but then that was that.
The company was managed by capricious, get-rich-quick types that kept making us perform dumb stunts and acting in really terrible promotional videos rather than finding customers. I didn’t exactly see the crash coming but I knew I wanted out. I think the trigger was the owner saying in total seriousness, “Red Herring is my Bible,” clutching a copy of the magazine. Who remembers Red Herring?
What a time to be alive.
When I got back in March from a great trip the company had totally imploded and sacked almost everyone but were pretending that everyone still worked there when I popped in to say hi to my friends/team - ‘out to lunch’.
I had a bit of hassle getting back into work, took me about three months I think to land a decent gig but then that was that.
Layoffs hit the email marketing agency I worked for, about half the staff let go as clients stopped spending. I survived because I was "the SQL database guy." The multimedia company I had worked for previously shut down suddenly. When the marketing company started to cut back even more I left to work at a big logistics company writing Oracle code.
The one skill that kept me off the layoff list multiple times: relational databases and SQL.
The one skill that kept me off the layoff list multiple times: relational databases and SQL.
There was a huge amount of verbalized prejudice against workers and their presumed bad habits in the parts of industry most affected. It took me a few decades to really process how ridiculous some of the biases were and that they were really an expression of a lot of insecurity that all those laid off people were going to show up as competition.
Mid-2001 - the dot-com I worked for folded. Switched to an enterprise (B2B) company that wanted to bring their legacy systems to the web. Win-win. Pay was conservative but the stability was what I needed then.
How big of a deal is the UST blowup to mass adoption? Did you just decide to leave today based on that news? Why not stay at your current role? It's not clear from you post.
i didnt work at an internet company during the dotcom crash.
i did however start my first programming job, in academia, in 2002.
i did however start my first programming job, in academia, in 2002.
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For the greybeards, what was it like working at an internet company throughout the Dot Com Crash?