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The dotcom boom definitely included decent wages but it wasn’t anywhere near as pronounced - lawyers and doctors weren’t trying to become software developers. A few people made a lot of money on stock options but that was usually the owners rather than the developers, and a bunch of people really weren’t even making more than boring corporate jobs when adjusted for the number of hours they were working at burnout.com.

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More money is more money overall, even if hourly rate falls when you work more hours than an alternative.

Oh, sure, but in the 90s if you wanted to work crazy hours you’d have made a LOT more money by going to law school and making those extra hours billable. A lot of dotcom people were making like $60-80k - not bad but not amazing - and hoping for a big options payout to make the extra hours more worthwhile.

$80k in 1990 dollars is equivalent to $192k in 2023 dollars. I'm not sure salaries are all that inflated compared to the .com days.

But only $140k by the turn of the century, which is when the dotcom bubble was happening. Again, I’m not saying it was terrible or anything, just that it wasn’t the equivalent of the FAANG engineers getting $400+k total compensation.

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