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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how serious you are being. Back then, money wasn't easy and those jobs didn't come back either. New jobs did emerge, though. We also didn't wait for the powers that be back then to figure it out, either, lest we forget that was the "series of tubes" era.

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Also dot-bomb was really nuclear winter for jobs in the tech industry. I was lucky enough to slide into a new job with someone I knew after I was laid off. I didn't have so much as a nibble anywhere else. The new company barely made it through but it did. The pay wasn't great but I mostly enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it directly led to knowing the person who brought me into my current role.

So far this is nothing like that from what I can tell. People are taking longer to land positions and at least some of the highest compensation will be very hard to come by, but there seem to be lots of positions. They may just be in insurance companies rather than prestigious tech companies.

There was no “nuclear winter”. I was an ordinary enterprise dev working for profitable enterprises like banks, insurance companies, etc and jobs were just as easy to come by from 1996 -2008.

I think part of it is that a lot of dev/tech-adjacent jobs that basically had to be done at a tech company or a company that depended on tech companies pretty much went poof. I'll believe that strictly dev jobs were still available (though that's not the common wisdom). It's probably also true that developers at trendy tech companies couldn't imagine slinging Java in insurance or banking.

In my case, I had worked for a computer company as a product manager (with some coding on the side) and then an IT industry analyst--and there was very little in that vein.

It's beside the point, but I think you're forgetting that Java was trendy 20 years ago. That didn't change until Ruby and Python came on the scene a few years later.

Yeah, probably COBOL and CICS would be better examples in that timeframe.

Exactly, they would have rather gone hungry than suffer being an “enterprise developer”

And, in fairness, they may not have really had much experience with mainframe, AS/400, etc. technologies. I probably wasn't going to hire a front-end HTML developer to write my business apps. Yeah, there was a fair bit of Webifying apps going on but probably a lot of mismatch between startup devs and enterprise devs in that period.

I was writing C and C++ mostly on the Microsoft stack from 1996-2008. I moved over to C# for Windows mobile devices by 2008-2011. I was using Sql Server and MySQL for a backend.

I also did a little HTML/JavaScript and Perl.

I graduated in 1996 and while I did take classes in FORTRAN and COBOL, I also took a class in C.

I learned C++, Microsoft technologies (MFC, COM, etc$ VB6 and SQL on the job as well as HTML, JavaScript and Perl from the O’Reilly series of books by 2000.

Microsoft and related was probably more insulated from the carnage in the startup world than companies like Sun were. I was much more familiar with the Unix and related vendors at the time. But pretty much all the big computer and storage companies took massive hits. As did anyone who depended on them for revenue.

It's absolutely not true that getting a job in tech, in general, wasn't a big deal in the early 2000s.

Exactly, a lot of the people who never got back into the industry should never have been there in the first place, eg. website designers using frontpage and getting paid the close to the equivalent of $200K in todays money.

Tend to agree with this take according to what I'm seeing while currently interviewing. Not as many sexy tech jobs in cool startups, but still plenty of boring jobs in banking/fintech, insurance, enterprise, etc.

I must have grown up in a parallel universe of the dotcom era: one of the biggest reasons -- and criticisms of - the dotcom Bubble growth was due to too much and easy (wait for it...) VC money. Back then, literally any wild, and foolish, idea that you could smack 'Tech' onto was guaranteed to get fast & easy investor money.

>Back then...

Oh wait...

To be clear, you're correct. That was this current wave's web3. Once the bubble burst, though, money stopped being so easy. That's the period we're about to come to now.

For reference, around the year 2000 the interest rates were around 5% (the fed rate).

So, no, in general terms there were no easy money then compared to today (or the years up to today).

But sure, a lot of the money that was around at that time went into IT/dotcom companies instead of into other sectors.

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