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Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

Maybe 30-40 years ago it was finance, but by 1996 with the Netscape IPO, it was clear to anyone coming out of school (as I was then) that tech was the future and finance was already old and tired after 15 years of dominance.

There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago.

Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.

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I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble.

"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.

Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.

You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.

Not exactly true, big tech did exist it was just different players. Sun was a strong player, as they were pushing Java, that was very popular in the enterprise world. Intel was considered a place that did a lot of interesting innovation. IBM/Oracle style players.

I think the big difference was that big tech was mostly on enterprise. The big shift to consumer focused big tech made a lot of the big tech more intersting place to work

> Google was a startup nobody heard of

This is not true in the early 2000s - I remember people at school (UK) using Google in the late 90s.

People forget that "the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed".

I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.

Regarding finance: Sure, M&A + IPO makes the lion's share of money for an investment banking (IB) division, but this overlooks the markets division (trading). From 1995 to 2007, the year-on-year growth in profits was simply astonishing for FICC (fixed income, credit, commodities). Part of that growth was due to increased borrowing (and, hence, leverage), and part was an increase in investable dollars, chasing returns. IB needs hardly any tech, but markets needs endless amounts of it. Also, it is intentional that I didn't mention equities trading in my previous paragraph; it didn't become such a giant profit center for global investment banks until after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, due to new rules for risk limits.

For us in Portugal, it was tech used by banks, finance, insurances, telecomunications.

If you wanted to be on the bleeding edge, you would be applying to mobile phone operators like TMN, Vodafone, Optimus, and then code over a remote telnet connection to HP-UX 11 server.

Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant.

The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.

Tech only started attracting real attention starting in 2008 when finance imploded. I remember very well that nerds/geeks were still considered weird outcasts back then. After the financial meltdown, tech really exploded and offered a much better lifestyle than finance, and thus became more accepted in American society.

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