Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?

By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something was 'a little off' and finding out that you were going to die in three months. Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the same disease.

Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn't until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.

It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a massive amount of damage to the industry.

You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during 2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc... Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you'll often see no sympathy for the 'talent shortage' complaint. Five years after cutting everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers demanding to know "where are all the people with five years of recent experience"

Dot-com I worked for went down hard. Sysadmin was reading management's email and telling people in advance they were going to get fired. Went from massive office to nothing in just a few months.

Practical advice: save money and live below your means. This will let you survive the next bust, whenever it happens, much better. It will also help you survive a non-systemic layoff, and will help you find better jobs... it's pretty much always a good idea.

https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/08/living-below-your-me...

People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on one dialup line, as a T1 was really expensive. We had to take turns downloading files. This was in San Mateo, California, not the middle of nowhere. The sysadmins once put out a request to the developers one time to physically show up and help move all of the servers. Our colo site got mad at us because we packed so many servers in that it overtaxed their air conditioning. Who buys their own servers now?

Now everybody is connected. You really can expect a huge number of normal non-technical people to be able to use your website to do everyday mundane tasks like hail a cab or order food. As Marc points out, all the stupid ideas from the bubble all work now. In 2000, selling pet food online was stupid. Now people buy so much online that physical retail businesses that sell generic stuff like pet food are going out of business.

Not sure if I can can communicate how utterly strange the internet was to most people in 1998. There had never been anything like it. People knew it would change everything, and they were right. It just needed a decade and a half for everyone to get network, get a client machine they liked (iPhone), and learn how to use it. I think Marc is right: this is the deployment phase of the technology. I do not think there will ever be another internet bubble. The next bubble will be in some new technology that does not work yet, like biotech or self-driving cars.

Or, maybe people are now so well-informed and information is in such a tight feedback loop that there will never be that kind of bubble ever again. Bubbles come from ignorance and a slow feedback loop. People forget how hard it was to find information in the past: you literally had to know where to physically go to get it. Now some dude in rural China can find out more about the meeting schedule of subcommittees the North Dakota legislature next week while sitting on the toilet than most people in North Dakota could in 1995 without at the very least making a bunch of phone calls all the time or living in Bismarck and going to the capital ever day: http://www.legis.nd.gov/ I was so confident of that sentence that I guessed that to be true and only searched for the site after writing that sentence: yup, there's an app for that.

I was a technical sales manager at a fast growing ISP focused on selling T1, DS3 and "business grade" DSL. The money was good. It felt like we were on top of the world. Embarrassingly, looking back, the movie that best describes our culture/ environment back then was Boiler Room. It's one of Vin Diesel's last movies before becoming a star w/ the Fast & Furious series and it's streaming on Youtube if you're ever interested. Different industry but same vibe. Most of us were recent grads from no name schools. There were also a few dropouts and a few who never attempted college. Depending on where you live, this would be the equivalent of coming out of school in your 20's w/ very few skills to make a doctor's salary almost 20 years ago.

Towards the end, every week for a few months, we'd talk/ read about mass firings or competitors shutting down completely. The writing was on the wall when the CEO brought in the PE guy (who still maintained his role at the PE shop he came from) in as a VP to "tighten things up".I was too young and naive to recognize what that meant but his role was to come in and get the company ready to be acquired or parted out like an old car at the junkyard. Yup, we were being prepared for the slaughter.

That last day was tough. We knew it was coming but didn't know when. Working under that type of environment is a tough feeling to describe. Big cardboard boxes on everyones desk one morning, along w/ an offer to take or leave was devastating & relieving at the same time. I took the offer and used the cash to start a company.

Some never recovered. Some had picked up bad habits (cars, alcohol, coke, fast life) while the money was flowing, making it harder when the cash dried up. I always lived a low key existence. I never appreciated it more than when our world stopped spinning.

A magazine (Fortune, The Industry Standard?) ran an article about the declining prices of dotcom IPOs and included the sentence, “It can go down to zero.” That was correct.

The highways were empty and I spent my time playing Vampire LARP in downtown Palo Alto , or talking with my friends about larping. There were no jobs anywhere and I almost moved out of state. However, I decided to stay and take the consequences. It worked out for me, but I occasionally see some people I knew from back in the day. They never bounced back.

I was in college at the time. I remember people saying during that time, once you graduate with a Computer Science degree, you'll get 45k a year starting salary, easy!

And then the bubble popped and they were like "Oops! Nevermind!"

Nowadays that number seems low.

Before: Mt. View cinemas with pre movie recruiting ads with sign on offers of a new car.

After: Ads for used routers and switches and office furniture.

I went through the whole dot com boom and collapse. The weirdest thing was driving on 101 during rush hour and it being empty.

It was shit. You took pay cuts to stay on a job or you left the field. Personally I worked through it but it was not fun and eventually had to leave the position anyway. Adrift in 2003 and thankfully late 2004 showed up and government started hiring contractors. Otherwise I would be making 40K a year teaching PE at a middle school.

Eagerly taking the sort of Beltway Bandit contracting job that we had mocked in 1999 when I graduated in 2002. Windowless basement in a '70s government building in suburban Maryland with the office furniture the government employees had rejected, writing and tracking Java unit tests, and I was deliriously grateful.

oh man, there was a lot going on back then. enron's rolling blackouts in california, 9/11, gray davis' recall, my roommate telling me that now was the time to invest because there was no way tdfx could go lower ...

what a time to be alive.

The Valley hit the floor so fast that the auction company selling off what was left of our startup just combined the auction with that of another startup in the same building that hit the floor at the same time.

A number of colleagues had become rich very quickly and "retired". When the bubble burst, I realized that the money rush was over, and my lotto number had not been drawn. However, within 2 years, most of those colleagues were selling their sports cars and looking for work again.

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Do you think we're in a bubble and it'll burst?

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