Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I think a major difference is that in the late-90s bubble, everyone felt like they were winning. Stock market valuations were rising, many ordinary Americans held stock in dot-coms, high-paying jobs were being created that were being filled by ordinary middle-class people. Ordinary people could look at their brokerage account and think "Wow, I'm rich now!"

The only problem was that it was all fictional. Having your portfolio worth a million dollars now is useless when it's only worth $2000 when you go to sell. Getting six-figure salaries at a dot-com when you just have six months HTML experience is kinda ridiculous (okay, we have a variant of this today as well).

In many ways, this boom is a lot more honest, and a lot more real. It has winners and losers, many (but not all) of the winners put in years of hard work to get there, and people generally have a sense of where they stand. The problem is that there are far more losers than winners. That doesn't make for a positive mood, or a stable society.

In the SV, it's not uncommon for iOS and Rails developers to be paid six figures after only a little training.

This is exactly what you said was happening in the dotcom era: middle class people put in high paying positions.

The point about the stock market stands though. It is the strongest difference the current era has with the 90s.

Without disparaging iOS or Rails developers, I assume that's what nostrademons meant when he said, "Okay, we have a variant of this today as well."

I would have thought he was referring to something more steps down on the totem pole. To do iOS or Rails development you actually have to know a programming language somewhat well, especially in the case of Objective C. Or so I would have thought; perhaps I'm in unaware of IDEs and tool chains that can cover for a lack of fundamental software engineering expertise.

The variant I'd have in mind is web designers masquerading as backend system developers. That's something Node has made possible. CSS and HTML experts usually know just enough JavaScript to be dangerous--JS is table stakes these days for UI work. Node creates the illusion that they can write backend middleware, APIs and services, too. Some of them surely can, but for every one of those, I've seen ten JS "rock stars" copy-and-pasting Angular and Express code from Stack Overflow, cargo cult style, at six figures.

It was as Hydraulix said, specifically graduates of coding bootcamps. Many (not all) of those programs are very reminiscent of the "web development is hot - you can make lots of money with few qualifications!" meme that was popular in the dot-com era.

I don't actually think that web developers of today moving down the stack is all that problematic. For one, a number of them can - modern web development is a lot more intricate than it was in 1997, and if you get beyond the Bootstrap stage, it usually requires that you actually understand fundamentals of how your browser works instead of just cargo-culting some code. People who can do that usually do well in any programming language. Beyond that, Node won't really let them - it will break pretty quickly if you don't understand callbacks, async patterns, modularity, etc.

The contemporary JS world has a lot of problems, but IMHO incompetent devs isn't actually one of them. (Going out on a limb, I'd argue that all its problems actually stem from devs that are too competent in one specific area not understanding what's important and what's not in the larger context of the software industry.)

Yeah but in 1997 people were making six figures after learning HTML and CSS.

The entry level bar is so much higher in 2015 that it's difficult to even compare. This feels more like the solo game programming boom of the late 80s and early 90s. Yes there's a ton of opportunity that's open to anyone with the skills. But it's nothing like the bubble was.

http://cdn.betakit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/slide087-7...

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