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Comment by MBlume | Hacker News Reader

Question from a new-comer: after the first bubble burst, was it difficult for a solid developer to find work in the valley? How much did salaries drop?

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As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with no business model aside from selling ads?

I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.)

A couple of things:

1. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market

2. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true.

3. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators.

Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc.

-Saif

I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it".

I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr.

During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.

I was 13 when it crashed but you have to remember that that was a very different world back then - 15 years ago we had dial up (well ISDN, which was twice as fast as a 56k modem) pay-by the minute and it was difficult to sell things over the internet, databases were expensive as were servers.

Today I have a far better connection in my pocket, servers can be rented by the hour of Amazon (so you can scale as you grow), stripe is available (at least in some countries) and Postgress is free. We also have much more productive languages than Java 1.2 (now with generics!!).

More importantly still, IT is everywhere. Every business needs, or could benefit from, a programmer. It might be something as simple as converting an access database into a real database and do some queries on it (say get a list of all companies with more than X foozies and send that to sales so that they can call them up and hear if they are totally happy. That query alone could be worth north of 10k month for a small medium business) or it might be to do something more complex.

I started a company in Pittsburgh in 2000. In 2001 we were able to hire CMU CS grads at $35K a year ($45K in today's dollars). Less than 1/2 what we would pay today.

So the article is completely wrong in saying that employees weren't hurt in 2001, only VCs.

The article doesn't say that.

"Unlike the 2000s, VCs will not be in the line of fire. Employees and founders would take the fall."

Employees and founders were in the line of fire in the 2000s, but unlike last time, the VCs won't be joining them.

I can't speak for the valley, but the market in Atlanta went from lucrative to bleak almost overnight.

In the upper midwest, the Y2K testing/fixing jobs disappeared in Jan/Feb of 2000 and the internet/e-commerce shops started closing in the fall of that year. 2001 was a tough year to look for a programming job and then it got much, much worse after 9/11. The job market didn't really recover until 2003.

(speaking in general, not the valley)

I was doing a lot of ColdFusion at the time (as I did most of my career). It's an easy language, and attracted a lot of folks that really weren't developers, but could bang out some script. I tried to counsel all I knew to be diverse, learn other languages, etc. Salaries dropped, but not too much, it was the total lack of jobs that really hurt.

This time around, whenever it happens, it'll be the 8-week "bootcampers" and those who specialize in pretty much only "front-end" development (meaning they do Angular/Ember/React/etc but can't be bothered to produce the back-end json) that will have the hardest time, IMO.

I personally know many "bootcampers" that are better engineers than many CS grads, and many "front-end" engineers that are better, more knowledgable, more up to date, and in higher demand, than the some of the crusty java devs who haven't changed or read a tech blog since 2002. Most can produce their own json, but most don't need to. I'm not sure they're the ones to fear for.

There will definitely be those who learn well, are hungry to learn more, and are talented. They're in a boot-camp just because it's there; ten years ago they'd have become an equally talented engineer. I'm not sniping at bootcamps, but at those who think it's an easy formula to a good career (as was ColdFusion or VB in 1999). Ditto on the developers who have the same year of experience 10 or 15 times. I guess a better way to summarize it is to say that anyone who thinks it'll be easy given some formula (bootcamp instead of degree or self-teaching, magical N years of experience, etc.) may have success during ideal market conditions, but will likely get shaken out when they have to compete.

(For reference, I identify with both groups, being a 38 year-old self-taught developer, no issues during 2000-2002 bubble, and learn at least one language a year.)

Fair enough, I like what you're saying here.

Here's a thread on the general topic that was posted 4 months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781768

A bit of personal anecdata: After the first bubble burst, I took a jib at $BIGCO for a slightly higher salary than I was making at the startup I was laid off from. $BIGCO was pretty stingy about raises and bonuses though during the bust, and I wound up leaving for another startup 4 years later with another slight salary bump.

Also after the burst, my roommate and I asked our landlord for a $700/mo rent reduction, and we actually got it.

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