And what type of work were you doing at the time? Thanks.
1. Wage stagnation 2. Moved from stock options to stock grants. Now you will never make f’k you money. You’ll be working for rest of your good years. 3. Ruling class allowed for importing cheap foreigner slave class (H1Bs) 4. Ruling class allowed for cheap Indian outsourcing firms. Ruined IT for American citizens. 5. Housing costs increased substantially 6. Quality of life lowered 7. Tech job no longer an elite job. Now it’s a job for foreigners
Worked for a startup which had ipoed before the bust, so it survived the crash. The company was actually BS, it burnt through all shareholder money and folded by 2009. I was out by then. Got lucky since I had a place to hide during the bust phase. Career growth was stagnant, but having a job was more important those days.
Kind of a vague question, but how would you stagnant career growth? Like compared to the promotions trajectory in a typical market, how long do you feel it set you back?
I didn’t work — but was graduating college and it went from amazing offers at the time to suddenly nothing — nobody was hiring.
Wow, so your offers were pulled? How long after graduation until you started your first job?
Offers weren’t pulled persay, just fewer offers handed out than 6 months previously. I waited almost a year.
I was a director level IT architect for a Fortune 10 company. I was in my 20s, and I lived like I was making a six figure salary (I was...) I’ll just say that did not end well. I moved away from the city I was living in and got a lower paying job elsewhere. Only in the past 10 years do I make more money. Pretty much killed tech jobs from 2000 - 2010. TC: $275k
I was a couple years out of college, making $85k, and feeling pretty good. The company grew to about 150 people, and then we had an off-site one day. The meeting started, but only 30 of us were there; everyone else was cleaning out their desks. I stayed for another 18 months and got to travel the world and then finally left. Company stayed around and grew and was eventually sold, but my options were worth zilch, so I got a small capital loss to declare that year. I eventually moved on to another startup and it took about four years to get back to my $85k salary. Edit: Realized I didn't answer the question. At the time, it was full stack work with HTML/JS front end and C back end. Started building some stuff in C# when .NET 1.0 came out. I still have PTSD from making things work in both Netscape and IE. TC: $450k
The responses here are instructive. After the crash the action moved to Wall Street . Everyone wanted to be an investment banker . The nerds settled for being quants. Ultimately that mania led to the financial crisis
I was in a solid enterprise software firm and we even found a buyer in 2002. I remember reading fuckedcompany.com every day and the traffic becoming super light. A lot of people went home and things were quiet for many years. I miss the days when the industry was only the geeky rejects who loved to tinker. All you had to do was recite the OSI model to reach a web page and know the difference between port 23 and port 21, and you were hired. Nothing worked that well but nothing was so complicated that you couldn’t pick it up with some discipline and practice. It was an era of shade tree mechanics doing hat tricks. The sun hardware costed a fortune so you lovingly coveted every box under your control. You could make good money just knowing how to configure a vlan, and there was lots of benefits knowing a bit about everything, because shit was always breaking. If your startup was an ISP (yes that counted back then) a perk might be to run your own box, which you’d promptly share warez and mp3s on across IRC. You’d hack your colleagues boxes by sniffing their telnet passwords over the hubs. You’d drink like 6 sodas a day because you couldn’t believe they were free. People would do fucked up things, and they’d be forgiven, partly because of the outdated values, but partly because everyone was a misfit and was used to being judged, so they were slower to condemn others. Sure the money is way more now, but we all give it away for housing so life hasn’t really gotten qualitatively better. There is also a palpable sense of hordes of people who are in the industry only for the Money.
Following.