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Comment by WasimBhai | Hacker News Reader

Sitting here in Pakistan, this scares me. I remember back at the start of 2000s' when the bubble had busted, and Pakistani software industry which is largely doing work that has been out-sourced, going more or less dead. Really talented engineers were unable to find jobs, and the whole CS boom which had reached here too, died down. Now there are so many jobs, and not enough kids which is making universities induct even more students.

In between all this, this talk of bubble busting literally freaks me out. When God forbid it happens, it will leave deeper scars than the 2000 one with many a stable careers coming to a sudden halt, and along with them their families.

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I was a teenager during the the dot-com bust in the Silicon Valley (Palo Alto/Stanford to be precise). Even PhD's and extremely driven & accomplished people could not find jobs. They simply weren't there. In the event that there is a bubble in start up investing I don't think that it will be as bad as it was when and if it deflates. The primary reason I think this is because the amount of demand for skilled software/hardware workers has grown to such huge & global proportions that it is not possible for VC's to affect it meaningfully anymore. Although I guess you could have said the same thing about housing in the U.S. back in the 2000s.

I know things were terrible for everyone during the dot bomb era, but just wanted to say that PhD holders often have a hard time finding the right position even in good times. They are highly specialized and believe they should command a high salary, but employers are resistant to paying a large premium unless their particular expertise serves their business need. Since PhD theses are by their nature esoteric, this leads to an unfortunate mismatch in expectations.

They were taking unskilled jobs or jobs they were extremely overqualified for just to make ends meet is what I was trying to get across. Several of my friends parents had to do this until things got better.

Even in 2000 it wasn't just about VCs. Big old companies put a lot of effort and manpower into new tech too. Those long established companies rolled back projects at the same time as the crash, funding was pulled from technology departments, and all technology people suffered due to the bust. I was out of work for 6 months and I was one of the lucky ones (had a cushion, hit the end of it, but found an amazing role).

"Even PhD's and extremely driven & accomplished people could not find jobs. "

That's definitely something that people usually don't take into account when they have a great job currently or pursue a "great" career.

Something in demand today that gets you in a great lifestyle will also put you in a super specific niche that, with all you qualifications, you can only do a very narrowly defined job. That may only exist in one place (the place you are currently working).

Otoh, if you are in, say, less glamorous job "sales" and you lose your sales position you can always find a job making money and selling something else. Not that there aren't super specialized sales jobs (say jet engines at GE) that would be hard to duplicate but you could probably land another high paying industrial equipment sales position.

I believe the outsourcing story is a bit better than it was in 2000. Better tools, better connectivity. It's entirely possibly that outsourcing could be antifragile.

Even if there is a downturn in outsourcing, so be it. Same happened in the US after the last bubble. Tons of folks who were drawn to the industry for pay, and have little depth in their skillset, flamed out and went back to careers they were better suited for. Those with more depth formed the basis of the current industry: soft business skills, multiple languages, those who loved the craft and learned on their own time.

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