He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recession, everyone at HP -- all the way up and down the ladder -- worked 9 days out of 10, and took a 10% salary cut, in order to ensure that there wouldn't be any layoffs.

People spoke about the company, and how it treated employees, with great pride, and the way that they treated workers during hard times was one major reason for that.

If nothing else, I learned from these stories that the boss/owner should be paid last, after all of the employees receive their salaries. I've done that whenever I've had employees, and I credit that lesson not just to general business ethics, but to a sense that business is about much more than just profit.

It's hard to imagine a modern company taking such steps to avoid layoffs, but the story continues to inspire me nearly 30 years later.

Snippet:

> We have always considered that we have a responsibility to our employees to plan our work so we can assure job continuity. We do not intend to have a "Hire 'em and fi re 'em" operation. This poses some serious considerations. One is always compelled to fi nd the most effi cient way to get a job done. At times it seems the most efficient way is to hire a group of people, work them as hard as possible, and when the job is fi nished, send them home. Well, even if this is the most efficient way, we have never operated in this manner. Bill and I do not feel this is the best way for a company like ours to operate. We have very rigid requirements of technical competence to maintain and rigid requirements in the quality of our equipment. This requires that we have and keep good people at all times. So we feel it is our responsibility to provide opportunity and job security to the best of our ability. This means specifically, sometimes we ask people to work overtime in order to meet customers' demands rather than hire additional people. While this is an imposition in a sense to our employees, it seems to be generally acceptable and we feel it is preferable to "hiring and firing." This is something you all need to understand as supervisors.

https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-...

"I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile-they make a contribution to society (a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental)"

Remember that Bill and Dave started HP as a 2 man operation in their garage during the great depression. They basically built the company from nothing into a technology power house over the course of their lives and the things that they went through clearly shaped how they ran the company. It is a testament that you can still find a large number of impressive engineers that were HP lifers.

Want to know why my resume is full of 1-2 year stints? Because when a project is winding down I've learned to start looking for a new job - because it's the safe thing to do. Managers will tell you up until the day you get your layoff notice that your job is safe.

My manager was fighting tooth and nail to try and save at least some of us. But come February (3 months longer than other IT teams) the fight was over and he lost. We were all laid off. I was given 6 months severance + insurance if I would stay around for 1 month and do a knowledge transfer to the new team, one of the easiest decision of my life. The majority of the team were escorted off premises that day.

Manager's boss helped everyone secure a new job (except 1 who just disappeared never to be heard from again), I got a contract gig for double the pay of that job.

I still talk to everyone, and we are all in better positions today than we were there.

Which way did you decide?

This is a good thing for people who want to work at those companies but are not yet employed there. Companies that can fire people easily are more willing to take a chance on someone without a perfect pedigree than those who insist on only hiring those that they are certain they want to work there forever.

I do agree that having forced off-time can be distressing to some people. Some may like to think they are indispensable to run the company, and suddenly they feel betrayed because their company doesn't need them working at 100%. Or they are optimistic and think the grass is greener elsewhere. Or...

Anyway, I think it would be interesting to see studies of """productivity""" when employees are forced to do part-time work. Based on what I know, I wouldn't too surprised to see good social benefits (but it doesn't mean everybody would thrive).

[1] A simple search here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=long+hours

Of course unions/employee representatives have a different place here(e.g. half of members of the board of directors are elected representatives of employees.)

France, Spain, Italy, etc... Tire-burning trouble starts with just mention of the possibility

Section 8(a)(3) of the Act makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer, "by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment[,] to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization." (An employer that violates Section 8(a)(3) also derivatively violates Section 8(a)(1).) For example, you may not

- Discharge, constructively discharge, suspend, lock out, lay off, fail to recall from layoff, demote, discipline, or take any other adverse action against employees because they support the union or engage in union activities.

Yup. My dad is big on that too. Always thought he overplayed it, but one day he explained that the people he employs are quite poor. So if they don't get paid they can't put food on the table - literally. While he has a bit more of a buffer.

While other services have 'head of line privileges' - basically the more senior you are the more you can cut in line to get food at chow time. In the Marines, you always line up most junior to more senior.

It drives home the responsibility leaders have to take care of the people who follow them.

Fair point I guess...to an extent.

People somehow manage to live paycheque to paycheque regardless of the absolute number they get paid in my experience.

In this particular case - it's in the context of 40% unemployment. So the market equilibrium is quite low.

I'd say generally the number at which you can no long afford to (a) put a roof over your head in a reasonably safe environment, (b) buy enough at the grocery to feed yourself and any dependents, (c) afford necessary medical care.

When you're trying to figure out how to make your paycheck cover only those things, we're not talking about disposable income anymore.

Did mean in one case I had to take the hit when the company collapsed and claim via RB2 (this is in the UK) - of course it turned out that my employer had not been making my NI payments so no unemployment benefit for me.

That's quite a brave move if you might end up never getting paid. Props

But when one of your co-workers is a single mum who lives in rented accommodation and is buying her electricity on a Pay As you go electricity key losing a months wages is more serious.

I've always thought of it in this investment sense with the risk to reward payoff.

I wish HP did the same reduce-work-hours scheme during the 2008 recession instead of the pay cuts w/o reducing the working hours. At least the pay cuts were voluntary but still...

"I really think this is what Bill and Dave would have done"

I have a good friend who has helmed several very successful software companies. His philosophy is quite different: it is unfair to ask employees to work take a pay cut (and work more hours) when they could find another job that would potentially pay them more money.

I'm not posting this to argue with the HP philosophy, but rather to point out that there are other ways for management to care about their employees.

For the record, I stuck with my current employer through some hard times (forced furlough was the worst of it) because I appreciated what the leadership was doing, and believed in the goals of the organization.

I'd love to been suggested that arrangement instead of the "We're sorry we are out of money" excuse I got (while the company was heavily spending in other stuff). 3 months later they "got a new client" and posted new job ads to hire back the positions (while swapping all senior positions with junior staff).

What angers me about the situation is not that I was laid off, but that it was a decision only justifiable by focusing exclusively in the short term.

The company froze the salaries and he kept his promise.

What followed was almost straight out of the Silicon Valley sitcom. Management know our existing product was a dead-end, but with 85% of the company laid off, our remaining VC funds gave us a decent runway, so they decided to pivot to ... something. That is, the entire company (about ~15 of us) would sit around in the boardroom and try to come up with new product ideas. Needless to say, that went precisely nowhere.

The CEO was pushed out fairly shortly after that and I had been brought in through his network. My layoff came about ~6 months later in the second round of layoffs which constituted only me. Thanks to the VP of engineering going to bat for me, I did get 3 months of severance. I spent 9 months looking for another job and finally found one in fintech in NYC which turned out the be, to this day, one of the best jobs of my career. I also met my now-wife and many of my best friends there. That time was both the most traumatic experience of my working career and the best thing to happen to me at the same time. I know it was much harder on many other people, but it turned out for the best for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint

They switched from an internet appliance (kind of like an early Chromebook) to smart deep packet inspection firewalls. Not a ton in common between those except that they both require hardware to be built.

If I remember right, local lore was that they pulled it off partly by realizing early that they needed to change direction and being well-funded enough that they had enough cash to start over.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063362

Posting anon.

In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.

To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.

Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.

As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.

That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.

I'm interested in hearing which, if you care to share.

Though if you are trying to point out the fact that we might get a skew towards success stories in this thread because those who actually made a success of the dot com crash are more likely to post about it then those who failed then I would probably agree with you.

I got on a plane to Japan immediately after graduation. It's been a fun and fulfilling 15 years, but I am reliably informed that there have, in fact, been engineers hired in the United States since then.

Besides, my big company is starting to bring more and more jobs on-shore again after finding out that doing it all off-shore doesn’t actually work.

For most westerners considering a move to Asia, I'd recommend Singapore over Japan. It's essentially Asia-light, and salaries are higher.

If you do have an American passport, you get a double-whammy in opportunity costs: you can already work in SV, and you still have to pay American taxes even when you are not working there.

---

The government housing in Singapore can be quite nice. But yes, you are going to live in a high rise tower, most likely. Not a country house.

Some people prefer urban living and short commutes.

One effect that I only appreciate after living in Singapore for a while and then visiting elsewhere: the peace of mind not having to look after all you stuff when you are out and about. In Berlin or London or New York, I need to constantly worry that someone would nick my laptop, if I leave it on the table in a cafe when going to the loo.

(I'm an American living abroad so I deal with this every year.)

Otherwise, you are probably better off in a lower cost place.

I assume you still have to do your American taxes, even if just to show that you didn't hit the threshold?

In London to get something of comparable quality I would have to pay at least 3000 pounds if not more.

Singapore has those 'gated communities', but it's actually the last place on earth to need them. ;)

I was VP Tech at a high profile ad driven startup. We raised $50M (Softbank money in those days). Spent a lot of it scaling up on Sun hardware, ran TV ads, saw tremendous response, then a week later the bottom in the ads business model dropped out. Literally a week later. Amazing.

We went from close to 300 staff in March (60 of which reported to me) to 7 in October. The CEO handled the layoffs.

Most of the developers who reported to me took months to find new jobs.

Many of the non-tech people who had found unique jobs in our business were not able to find similar work again and went to business school or law school.

I had worked day and night to scale up, then worked day and night to scale down. I burned out. I moved, stopped working for pay, lived on savings, went to grad school (in CS) for a while, then finally got back on the horse in 2005.

Some advice- worrying about the next bubble bursting is a distraction, like following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question, but the right plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and whether there is a bubble or not is kind of irrelevant.

You might lose your job in the midst of major investment, or you might weather repeated rounds of layoffs. Random things will happen uniquely to YOU. They have to all of us.

The average story is helpful context but it is not your story. Protect and defend yourself. You are the only one who can.

Internalizing that can be the best thing any developer does. It is way more impressive to talk about all the skills you have acquired in your career in an interview than it is to talk about how your last company crashed and burned and you rode it right into the ground.

Make your plans for how you want to advance your career, what you want to learn, what field you want to work in, the companies that are places where you could pick up relevant skills. And plan for things you could do in the down time between jobs.

Familiar sounding story. I've got lots of friends who took it as an opportunity (or were forced by it) to switch out of tech careers. Lots of people I know went and became things like paramedics (at least three I can think of), nurses, doctors, lawyers. A bunch were well enough off to be able to reinvent themselves creatively as photographers, musicians, DJs, producers.

(I'm from Sydney, so it didn't hit anything like as hard here, I was at what would these days be called a startup in the online travel industry. We'd hit $1mil in turnover @~32% margins in Jan and had an offer on the table which my would have turned my ~5% equity into a quite nice house paid for outright if we'd taken it. Then when Sept 11 happened we lost 90% of our US customer revenue over night (which was by far the bulk of our customers). Didn't _kill_ us outright, but it took us ~2 years to recover back to our next $1m month. We struggled on for another half dozen years before selling the business to a competitor, and I eventually spent my entire share proceeds from that sale taking a handful of friends out to a (very nice) dinner.)

I definitely wouldn’t have moved somewhere the economy depended so greatly on luxury goods and services, for instance. It was hit really hard by the GR.

Our office was insane. Exposed rafters with the trusses and everything painted black. Our walls were deep blue but had blue neon running the length of the room on all sides. No overhead lighting.

Our developer floor was elevated with sub-floor network cabling. We had a dev floor about 100 yards by 50 yards, the size of a football field, roughly. A little shy of that. Private offices had glass walls facing the dev floor. Our sound studio (these were the flash days) was a hollowed-out VW bus in a soundproofed room.

We had a fire pole from the bosses office down to the dev room, conference tables with in-layed TVs. It was pretty wild.

In my time there, I built ~400 replicated sites for Colliers realty, DuPont Registry's website, a bunch of websites for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Tampa Bay Lightning's website among others. We were printing money.

The crash hit hard, and Hydrogen Media dwindled. Massive layoffs, and eventually it renamed to Bayshore Solutions and relocated to Tampa where they still do business to this day.

We were joking about the pets.com of the world - buying pet food, selling it at a loss, and trying to make up for it in volume. At least we had a business model that made money, a foosball table, and actual personal offices for each developer. When the stock market tanked... everything just shut down. People stopped buying or investing - and anything that assumed growth, for the most part, died. Starbucks with long, long queue lanes were empty.

As some companies died, there were opportunistic shops that were looking for solid talent. As they sold off our little shop of ten people, I ended up getting an offer and then being one of the folks left behind to turn the server room lights off. I had negotiated a start date a few months into the future, and very thankfully, they honored the offer. Things got worse. There were several more bits of belt tightening - we had a 25% round of layoffs later as the impacts of a bad economy really hit home. I did well/got lucky - but while the first round cleared out a lot of 'charlatans', I saw many solid people go on that black Friday

Salaries dropped - or at least stopped growing for most senior people. The rise of off-shore came and the realities of global economies eventually settled in. Large swaths of people turned their back on development... and here we are today, where it can be tricky to find solid folks again. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

If one can put two sensible lines of VBA that solves a particular problem (e.g. in Excel or whatever context), I believe such person has enough knowledge to not to be unemployable, even today. We are not talking about mid/high six figures - there are plenty of jobs in-between.

Yea, that doesn't sound anything like today!

/sarcasm

A few were still just interview with no test. Some would have a second round - mostly corporates, which were mostly a repeat of round one but with someone else. In that era I can remember just one whiteboard interview, which also required a surprise presentation. I passed, but didn't want to proceed. The interview put me right off them. :)

On the interviewing side it was actually depressingly common to have one or two turn up and hard fail the easy gifts, and completely fail to explain encapsulation, or know what a constructor was etc. There were quite a few trying to wing it with a couple of years C++ or Java on the CV when they maybe sort-of knew a bit of C and fancied a bit of the absurd y2k and dot com money that TV kept on about.

Two years later, I took a US Army contracting job in Germany, and through a couple of twists and turns, have been in the IT department of a large German auto parts manufacturer for eight years now... where we just got our 40 hour contracts cut to 35. My husband (engineer) and I live about the same lifestyle that our neighbors who are secretaries and mechanics do, so finances will not be a problem unless we're both unemployed for over a year.

My advice: don't take on unnecessary expenses that you would have a hard time backing out of (big car note) or that would tie you to a place (mortgage on something that would be hard to sell for what you owe), and think hard about what are needs (eating healthy food, recreation) and what are wants and conveniences (having prepared food brought to you, expensive activities and exotic travel). Go ahead and enjoy your wants a bit while times are good, but be ready to cut them out when the punchbowl gets taken away.

Salaries were still pretty good (but flat) for those pros who stuck around and had actual technical skill, but a lot of the newer people to technology had it much rougher.

I thankfully had my CAD/CAM background & contracting to fallback on while hunting for those 7 months, but it was enormously demotivating & disenfranchising. I was within a couple weeks of just abandoning a career in software entirely and going back to what I knew permanently.

I expect it all worked out in the end, as I'm now CEO of a startup doing a thing I'm really interested in and have successfully raised money to fund it along side our early revenue. But, it was still immensely crappy at the time and shocking to see just how extreme the pendulum can swing in terms of available jobs, pay scales, etc.

The bottom fell out of the market, and though I had two summers an intern under my belt, there were hordes of devs with 1-2 years experience in specific stacks I was competing against. Most offers that were secured were rescinded.

I was somewhat fortunate- I did not plan on going back to the place I interned at, but facing no other prospects I reached out and they offered me a job- for literally 37k. I swallowed my pride and took it- it was a small consulting firm, close to my house, and they had just scored a new project for a major sports organization.

I kept looking on the side in hopes to get a better offer, but got literally zero bites on it. After one year there (and my boss tried to get me excited about a 3,000 but 10% raise) I got my first actual response to a submitted resume for a place that seemed terrible. The month after that I got a second call, that didn't work out. The month after that a third callback- and they made an offer on the spot- for 55k. I was over the moon- it was at least a living wage, and working in finance for a group that was working on what would later be called high frequency trading.

Things picked up from there, but I didn't hit that 75k mark for another year or so.

It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away on the feature branch I'm currently on until the whole lot of it is deprecated. There are two nascent forks running around here that I think show promise.

I weathered three rounds of layoffs and that was pretty harsh too. Every morning we'd check fuckedcompany.com and look for Ask in there. One morning it popped up with a 60% layoff in two days. It was almost exactly right; 16% of staff were laid off. Someone mis-heard the number.

I was in a smaller off-shoot office, so when people were cut they were called into the managers office, and while there security would pack their desk. When they came out of the office the box was just sitting on the floor, right outside the door. By the second round the manager just wouldn't come in that day, and the main office would send some stranger to do it.

At first I rationalized the people who were cut as people who weren't valuable, weren't adding to the bottom line. They were the less technical people, and their jobs were more nebulous, so it was easy to ease any mental pangs. It was a way of coping with something similar to survivor's guilt. Then when I was laid off, well, it was a tough time for me personally. I couldn't help applying the same rationale to myself. I wasn't valuable. I wasn't adding to the bottom line. The company is better off without me.

They gave me a pretty nice severance check. I convinced them to keep me on for another week to document my project. It was actually one of the only cash-positive projects at the company, due to contracts with Visa and Nike. That extra week pushed me into 2 years of tenure, which bumped my severance from two months pay to three.

I did not do anything mature with the money.

Generally the attitude I saw was to hunker down and try to weather the storm. Nobody interviewed because nobody could get recruiters to answer the phone. And nobody wanted their manager to think they were interviewing; that was a great way to be called in first during the next round. And lots of late nights working; gotta show you're still committed, despite everything crumbling around you.

What I saw and experienced was enterprise devs basically just kept doing what they did. Startup devs that could went into (or back in some cases) to enterprises. Enterprises used it as an opportunity to snag up good devs at a bit of a discount in many cases.

To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. One nice side affect I thought was that the crash cleared out most of the people claiming they were developers but had no real experience or talent. Most of my friends and people I worked with were fine and at worst might have gone back to an enterprise gig or in many cases were already there and didn't really miss a beat.

IMHO, if we have a crash this time (versus just a softening market), it will be similar as the need for quality software devs won't disappear. It will take longer to find a position in general and there won't be as much money floating around but decent developers are not going to have a hard time putting food on the table or finding work. Remote work will suffer, pay will suffer and VC dollars will drop dramatically, but the average developer will be fine.

My anecdote is the opposite: My father was an engineer at a company that made machines for semiconductor manufacturing.

They had a physical product, customers liked them, they sold each machine at a profit - none of the obvious-with-hindsight folly of companies like Pets.com.

However, when the dot-com bust happened they went out of business anyway. Turns out the collapse of the likes of Pets.com dropped the demand for semiconductors from the point where every wafer manufacturer wanted to expand capacity to the point where no-one wanted to. Boom, no orders. And of course, some investors when they see 'tech stocks' are falling, will sell your stock even if your business is much less speculative than the likes of Pets.com.

There were three lessons I learned:

1. Your business may be nothing like Pets.com and may seem to have strong fundamentals - but if the bottom falls out of tech stocks, you can end up unemployed anyway.

2. When the going gets tough, satellite offices get hit before head office.

3. If you have car/mortgage/credit card payments, you can get insurance that covers the payments if you lose your job. A lot of the time this isn't a good investment - but once the company started laying people off and everyone could see the writing on the wall, people with debt brought gold-plated insurance and were glad they did.

Lucent (AT&T spun them off to commercialize things from Bell Labs) had the absolute best product of the late 90s/early 2000: the Ascend MAX DSLAM/modem bank. Before that, an ISP needed T1 phone lines (24 channels) plugged into a CSU plugged into 24 modems plugged into a chassis that would emit serial that would be plugged into a router, along with a server that would do authentication and logging for billing and IP assignment. The Ascend MAX turned all of that into one box: phone connections to ethernet and all services provided and remotely administrated. Insanely great.

The problem was that Lucent's salespeople were very good, and the market for new ISPs was huge -- everybody was starting one or expanding their available markets -- so Lucent started offering financing.

When you finance your house or car, your loan is backed by the asset: the house or car still has some large percentage of the loan value at any given time, even with depreciation.

When you finance your ISP equipment purchase, Lucent assumed that they could always repo the MAX and sell it at a discount to some other growing ISP.

They didn't count on the ISP market collapsing.

Last time much of the entire market and product was new, e.g. web purchasing was barely in its infancy, companies were building up around that and the web wasn't an integral part of peoples lives, yet. Today, everything we do is around smart devices, the internet etc, so I don't think a collapse like we saw during the dot com boom/bust is likely. But that's just my opinion, could be totally wrong.

That was my experience as well, all the weird roles got cut in companies, all the crazy extras removed, but the companies that had working business models kept on trucking and hiring competent developers, and competent developers at unsustainable businesses had no trouble finding new work.

Because at the end of the day, the dotcom crash was about the crazy financial expectations of internet-enabled companies, not a rejection of the internet itself.

For a huge example: Madoff was only discovered because of the 2008 crisis. SEC had plenty of evidence against him for years before that, including the fact he did not actually trade! The guy didn't even trade securities and posted consistent double digits returns! The SEC did not investigate. Only when clients started asking for funds has the scheme collapsed.

https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm

Not sure if this was the case at your company, i.e. if they had the permission to do so. If not then I don't know why they didn't prosecute that trader. Most organizations cannot do naked shorts and have to pre-borrow securities.

    occasional recessions are useful because they 
    destroy bad ideas (not exclusively bad ideas, 
    but many bad ideas) and therefore free up resources 
    for new ideas. Some of which will be good, some bad.

The stuff built in the early dot-com era was typically garbage from a technical standpoint. Heaps and heaps and heaps of spaghetti code written in PHP, Perl, and ASP Classic. You could theoretically write maintainable code in those technologies if you were truly dedicated but this was decidedly not the norm.

Think of literally any basic best practice for writing either the server or client portions of a web application that we might follow in 2019. In, say, 1997 those best practices hadn't been invented yet and even if you traveled back to 1997 in a time machine you couldn't implement some of them since the technology hadn't been invented yet.

From a technical perspective, roughly 2002-2006 was when things started to get really good from a technical standpoint.

- A lot of untalented folks (people calling themselves "developers" but with no real coding ability) were filtered out of the industry.

- A lot of lessons had been learned about how to build this stuff.

- More and more people were getting high-speed internet access.

- The use of AJAX to build responsive client-side applications became a thing, thanks largely to...

- ...Google, who released two absolutely world-shaking web applications in Gmail and Google Maps. These became something of a guiding light in a number of ways. Both from a technical showcase of what could be accomplished with web standards, and a design perspective... it showed a lot of pointy-haired bosses that what people wanted was minimal design and maximum usefulness, not a flashy multimedia experience.

- Other "Web 2.0" tech like RSS matured and enabled LOTS of cool demos (sadly we've moved away from this...)

- Pressure from Firefox forced Microsoft to finally embrace some more web standards and we edged away from the brink of a Microsoft-ruled internet

I would say the bust had no substantial impact on technology side of thing. Perhaps the pricing became bit more modest, and sure, lots of careers were "filtered out".

I think that it did, because it focused development efforts of companies that remained in business. Many failed dot-coms should have failed before the bust, but they kept acting like working businesses as long as they had capital available. They diluted markets, absorbed development talent by offering equity and large salaries, and in general distorted the whole industry.

After the bust, the technologies and idea that got attention/effort/built up were the ones with a solid foundation, not the pipe dreams.

It was a Microsoft-only thing for a while though, until Mozilla/Safari/Opera implemented their own versions. That took a few years IIRC.

At any rate, Gmail was what made the world really take notice of what AJAX could do.

So I'd only caution people to pay close attention the whole time so you can know when to jump back into the market and to capitalize on that next salary increase.

I did fine in 2009 when I was laid off, getting a job in a month, but hiring can be random and I knew some great people that struggled to find their next role. Some developed issues as a result that raised the bar yet higher. People are crazy and irrational so never take these things personally. Deliver good work and keep acting in good faith to find a place that will treat you well. Smart people don't want to live in contexts of misery.

Can you expand on this? I'm honestly curious about what machinations begin once a company dies or the market sinks.

But a couple key things change (many more do too these are two I look for), yes capital is harder to come by, or at least requires better fundamentals and connections but the overall market is in a selling mood (e.g. good buying market). So enterprises and healthy businesses are looking for things to buy on the cheap (which is relative to the high of the market), and how to expand cost effectively. There is of course a cool down period that you have to get through before this starts happening.

Enterprises after they snap up their initial FTE roles they need to fill start looking for a lot more consultants to fill project roles versus bringing on more FTE's. This opens up more consulting gigs at pretty favorable pricing usually. You can now hire people to expand a consulting practice because people are less expensive so you can grow when things are "down" for others.

When the air pops out of the system people also get discouraged from the market and run away. A lot of the speculators will back out and so it becomes a more sane environment for a few years. If you are a developer and just work through it as things recover you change jobs a couple of times and you can really jump your salary during the recovery because there is a time when demand becomes super high but supply again is low. This also is again where it is awesome to be a consultant, I kept increasing the rates for my company all through the downturn and people would pay.

Outside of tech a downturn is usually time to capitalize on real estate, rentals and a host of other things. But you have to set yourself up to do this usually a little before things take a full slide into that first year. But if you are relatively debt free and can take some debt on during the down point of the market on real estate you can make a lot of money on the upswing. To be clear, real estate may not crash at the same time or rate, or may not at all. But the demands for rentals vs buying changes as does the buying power of people, so you can leverage those both.

So there's this giant catfish in Japanese mythology, the Namazu. It's captive in the ocean, under a giant keystone held down by the daimyojin Kashima. When Kashima gets tired or distracted, he lets off pressure a little, the Namazu wriggles around to get free and that wriggling sets off earthquakes and subsequently, tsunamis.

After an earthquake, there's always a rebuilding and a redistribution of wealth. And after the Edo earthquake of 1855, woodcut prints depicting the namazu and society (namazu-e), money falling from the sky, businessmen vomiting and defecating money, etc. got super popular. (https://www.illustrationchronicles.com/When-Giant-Catfish-Sh...)

My company went from 1500 people to about 300 people in 1 year. Layoffs decimated the company, and eventually we were bought by a competitor. I have coworkers who were out of a job for 2+ years. One of my personal friends on H1B had to pump gas overnight, and transferred his balances between credit cards just to stay alive. Entire technology parks were abandoned wastelands.

Even worse was that the idea of "outsourcing" to India started up during this time. So not only we were losing our jobs, the thought was that we could possibly be losing our jobs forever, because why wouldn't the engineers in India be just as effective for 1/5 the price? The per-capita job loss in Silicon Valley was worse than Detroit in the 80s, and the job losses were so bad that the traffic on 101 was actually okay.

I honestly felt like my way of life was dead, I even went to the hospital for a panic attack. Take into considering that while the wages for software engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now. I was making good money, almost 6 figures, and it felt like I might have to find a new job in less than 5 years. It felt like a very dire situation.

After a couple of years, things started to stabilize, and it didn't feel so dire. However, I think people who went through the bust like I did were naturally reticent about joining companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc which were the next wave of companies that defined Silicon Valley so we missed out on a lot of upside.

That is a common misconception when people do not take inflation and housing cost increases into account. $1USD today is worth only 65 cents in 1999 according to the consumer price index:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1USD+in+1999

CPI inflation is only 56%, but house prices in the Bay Area have risen 280%:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=median+house+price+san...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/22/median-price-tag-for-...

Tech worker salaries only seem high relative to salaries for other workers, because the tech worker salaries have not been falling in inflation/housing cost adjusted terms for the past 30 years. IMO computer programmers are, as a whole, grossly underpaid today, just not as underpaid as much as people in other lines of work.

The savings are almost always overstated by a huge margin: people with equivalent skills charge more or move. Most of the sales pitches assumed you’d get good results at, say, 20% but don’t work when that’s really 85%.

Moonshots: I dropped out of school with only a year left to graduate because the Web development startup I launched with two of my friends was getting out of control. We were charging over $100/hr in the 90s and still having to turn down clients. We worked on amazing projects I can barely remember and made a pile of cash. But we were kids and couldn't get along so we split. I joined another startup that got bought out and put more cash in my pocket which led to me following leadership to yet another startup... that died pretty hard in the Fall of 2001.

Aftermath: Money, parties, travel, and then boom... it was over. Although I had been an irresponsible child with my earnings, I had the good fortune of having some saved some before I was laid off - and I could collect unemployment benefits.

Like everyone else, I couldn't find work anywhere. There was a flash cartoon back then called "Laid off: a day in the life". Good times, good times. I went back to school to finish earning my BS in CS. While in school I tried desperately to get a job in the service industry. I couldn't even land a job waiting tables. Managers told me that they had plenty of people that could work at any time and they didn't want to fuss with people who had school schedules. One manager told me he had over 1,500 applicants at his new restaurant. After having held a Director title in 2001, I ended up starting over again with a fresh degree and a job as a Jr Videogame Programmer in 2003. At least I was working on videogames instead of web! (spoiler, I'm back in web, but that's another story)

I still don't think I've fully come to terms with the unrealistic expectations I developed early in my career. I rose to success quickly because I had a head start in web tech just as the industry around it was taking off. After the crash I had to work hard for things like everyone else which means coming to terms with the realization that I am not as special as I thought I was.

One of my first managers I had after becoming a developer used to say, "Listen, if you don't get your stuff done, you're going to be having fudge stripes and pringles for breakfast, ok!?" All of us junior devs had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

I always thought, "That doesn't sound too bad to me."

It was actually a reference to this cartoon. Thanks for solving a 10 year old mystery for me!!

Not all success is your own making. Often you are just riding a wave that takes you up but will also take you down if you are not careful.

Indeed. When 2008 hit, it was reminiscent of what ~2002 felt like, except instead of tech it was basically happening to everyone. In that way I felt more prepared to deal with the new crisis because I'd learned from the old one.

- Any news about a "recovery" has nothing to do with the reality you are likely facing.

- The worst of it is in the long-tail, not necessarily the initial shock.

- The change in the market from, "We can grow our way out of anything!" to, "Quick! Circle the wagons and lay low." happens a lot more suddenly than you expect, but there are also warning signs.

- You're super valuable and totally super employable right up until the moment that you're not, and in the wrong place at the wrong time you have no control and almost no influence over changing that, so be prepared to weather it or jump ship.

- Super high software developer salaries seem somehow correlated to VC-pumping, and when the market fundamentals kick in, you're likely to find yourself facing steep cuts, so live like you're a mechanical engineer, not a lottery winner.

Not sure how he resolved it (whether he negotiated his tax bill down with the IRS or came up with a payment plan).

Unrelated to bankruptcy, ou can also file for an offer in compromise, which collapsing option values or an excellent candidate for.

Here is an earlier discussion on taxes on options: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020063

Also in some cases especially with public companies they gifted you the options as income. That got marked as income even if the stock then tanked and you couldn't sell the stock for what the gifted value was.

There were various ways to get yourself screwed up.

Also, we may be hearing many stories like that after the Bitcoin bubble when IRS goes through the records more carefully. Always remember to take profits the instant you make those profits, put some of that cash aside for yours and IRS's sake. Always.

Bitcoin is a commodity, if you buy at $10k and the value drops to $5k, you have straight losses. You don’t owe taxes on paper gains unlike the totally ridiculous and insane situation with stock options. The government blows.

A buy, full ride up and down to the same level, followed by a sell shouldn't be taxable income.

Sometimes if the amount is ridiculously out sized compared with ability to pay the IRS will settle for a lower amount.

Notable if the IRS ever filed a lien against you: IRS Form 12277 Application for Withdrawal of Filed Form 668.

I quit in May, the company died a painful death about a couple months after that. I heard it was pandemonium there. They simply could not raise any more money. Plain and simple. But of course, I had no severance and no unemployment.

But whatever. It was what it was. I basically got stoned and played video games for the next 5 months. I really needed that. Fortunately I had some money saved away because at that time I wasn't doing anything with stock trading. So there was that.

From October to February I looked for a job, and got hired at a pretty good place, but wow the sentiment was completely different.

I don't know what SF was like in the early 2000s but that honestly sounds normal for SF.

Did you find this 5 month period notably changed your life philosophy/trajectory?

This was the first, "learn to code," era that I recall, so there were a lot of not-necessarily computer savvy people in the industry, and they were getting hired. Once things started to slide, companies just stopped hiring as a sort-term strategy, many held layoffs too. Many people were pushed out of the industry for good. I was stuck as a contractor and in-between contracts out of blind luck. I was 4-5 years into a promising career and I couldn't find work for 6 months. I felt absolutely worthless.

Fortunately I knew a guy who was a partner at my previous contracting firm. He just pulled a CIO position in a city 2 hours away and they needed someone to take over their engine (software shop). I had to pick-up and move, but I got a job that paid a lot less than my previous ones.

I survived, partly because I worked hard, like I was scared to lose my job. I still work that way. People take notice and will call you when they switch companies and need to fill a position. Because of this, I haven't had to do a formal / cold interview since the dot bomb.

I was a front office developer analyst at leading buy-side finance company. One memory that really stuck was elsewhere in tech, if you were in an infrastructure related role, full time employees were receiving letters saying:

"The company is downsizing. Your position is one that is scheduled for strategic reassignment to an offshore consultancy (TCS). Following this transition, your position in the company will no longer be required. If you stay with the firm and help train your replacement, you will receive X months severance. Thank you for your cooperation."

The other tech teams had to work with offshore consultants while doing work that managers hadn't figured out how to outsource. IT management essentially had a mandate to outsource anything possible and lower costs. Creating value for business was secondary. Managerialism sucked all of the life out tech. Being a programmer wasn't enough. You had to solve business problems.

This turned out to be very useful advice. I saw all around me the consequences of not doing so. So, I learned programming during the day (mostly sql, relational db modeling, scripting and reporting) and unfamiliar finance and business concepts on my own during nights and weekends. This helped me advance myself into greater challenges and varied terrain.

I'm no longer in finance but got a lot out of the experience. I did the best I could with the resources available and without compromising my integrity just to survive at someone else's peril. I learned that managerialism can bring new product development and growth to a complete halt. Technology solutionism over promises and under delivers. Business cycles and availability of credit determine who gets their moment of power and influence. No role is guaranteed.

Keep hustling, people. Complacency and convenience may alleviate stress, but if you are not growing personally or professionally, you may struggle worse during hard times. Never stop developing yourself.

I spent the crash in the financial industry which was hit in its own way: one fire-sold company office, one closed satellite office with a job transfer to a consulting company maintaining the same codebase for the company who closed the sat office. That last was my worst job ever but paid rent. The day the final retention bonus/bribe to take the consulting gig hit my bank, 6 of us resigned to come over to our next early-mid-stage startup. My ex-colleagues from the original office seemed to have slower job searches but all found interesting and fruitful work. (The office was a D. E. Shaw & Co. office: fully staffed with higher than average caliber devs. All found work reasonably quickly.)

In the 2008 GFC, that was much less a tech bubble and more a general financial issue. Our company just grew more slowly as the world worked itself out of that crisis, so I have no meaningful insight about that one.

To the extent that this “bubble” feels much less severe than 1999, I suspect more than 3/4 of qualified devs will do just fine in any tech bubble burst. Terrible devs barely hanging onto their job now could easily be shaken out into another field. That might even be better for them overall.

I was going to un-link with him, but realized this is a good reminder that you are on top of your game until you aren't, and if you don't keep on the leading edge of things, the world will pass you by.

Hasn't changed that much, except now there's the in-between step of getting hustled by a boot-camp promising big $.

When I went into college, they talked about all these great internship/co-op opportunities that everyone got. So each year I went to the career fairs seeking them out:

- Freshman year: Go away, we only want juniors

- Sophomore year: Go away, we only want juniors (though I got lucky and had a single hit that I did take up on)

- Junior year: Go away, the tech economy crashed. We only showed up because we didn't want people to forget we exist.

After college, I attempted some semblance of a grad school experience to bide my time, while looking for work on top of it. Unfortunately, I often felt like I was competing with all those people with the critical "4-5 years of experience" who were unemployed. Furthermore, everything I did find seemed to be crappy contract positions requiring tons of experience for very little pay.

Eventually I got a gov't job that needed my degree, but didn't use or develop my skills. I got quite depressed, as I felt like all my education and personal development was going to waste and was going to rapidly become worthless. When I finally escaped, it was to a worthless job at a different employer that actually had future grown opportunities. This ultimately allowed me to pivot into the kind of job I actually wanted, and the rest is history.

Of course the takeaway from this is that I was already 4-5 years post-graduation before I had the opportunity to take my career in the direction I was expecting to go immediately after leaving school.

Fast forward 1 year later, i started a PhD in a research lab working on sound hardware / software in the SV. The day i arrived i noticed something weird : the first floor of the pretty big building was completely empty. There were still computers and mugs on some desks, but other than that it looked like a weird epidemic killed everyone.

I learned later that half of the employees of the research center (including the local boss) had been fired two weeks before i arrived, and everybody had been moved to the second floor. I couldn't complete my PhD because they wouldn't finance new research anymore, so i went back to France and look for a job. After a few months trying to look for work in the audio field in vain, i finally ended up finding a job at a consulting firm, doing mundane backoffice development (database, web-based interface, in corporate environment).

So, basically it went from "we'll hire just anybody, even unqualified", to "PhD looking for a job" in just a year.

There are times when I miss it. Of all the jobs I've had over the years, it was the most meritocratic. If you did your job well and didn't cause too much rework, they loved you. I don't miss the hazardous/chemically toxic work environment, though. Those two years felt like a decade of wear on my body.

Think of it like wearing shoes at the beach. Yeah, they protect you from most of the sand as you're walking around, but enough gets past that you still have to dump them out when you leave.

They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing requirements of the clients.

Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised canteen.

One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store. We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.

One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev, what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.

I left soon after that.

That isn't to say some programming geeks didn't get sacked, but they tended to land on their feet. Also, it was often the hard-negotiating salary-seekers who found themselves in the cross-hairs, and possibly facing a slight decrease in standard of living, because of the big price tags they'd put on themselves.

One reason my experience wasn't catastrophic was that I was at an infrastructure company, not a hype-driven one like Pets.com. If/when the current ad bubble bursts, average devs will fare best working at companies several steps removed from the hype. People may not want micro-targeted ads, but they'll still need software.

I knew a bit of coding and was scheduled for the Arsdigita boot camp [1] that would learn me up to be a real programmer. Instead I got laid off with 3 months severance. They had the decency to do it on December 2 so I had health care through Christmas.

I got a job with a local tech consultant about 3 months later, which paid the same as the dotcom job. I kept my dotcom stock option paperwork for a little while for nostalgia's sake... {sigh} I thought I was on my way to being rich the day I got those papers...

[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/boot-camp

(This will give you an idea of what a web programmer was expected to be able to do back then. Today what would you call someone who can install Unix on hardware, install and configure Oracle, install and configure a CMS, and code up an entire web site?)

For companies that expect to survive for years after the layoff, they may give you X months on payroll, and then Y months severance. Your options expiration because of no longer being an employee would generally start after the X; but I think most of the layoffs then were immediate --- the companies needed you off payroll ASAP, so they could stop paying healthcare and what not.

In the dot com crash era it was common for your options to have a strike price higher than the stock price (under water) so no sense in exercising them, since they are worth negative.

Of course, with the down-turn, and given that we were effectively trying to position ourselves as CRM middleware, all bets were off. The business dried up, and our burn-rate was through the roof. Word got out the day before about the upcoming layoffs. The next day there were kegs of beer that sat out in the engineering pits.

IT had a helluva time, as a lot of people walked off with their laptops and company-issued phones. The dirty secret was that there was also a complete (still shrink-wrapped) palette of brand new 2U Dell servers in the loading bay that mysteriously went missing in the CO office that day.

Like a naive babe in the woods, I survived the first 2? maybe 3? RIFs. Even as I was building a website that listed all of our hardware and furniture for sale, and unracking and packing all the servers from the colo—I still didn't get it. Reality hit like a brick.

I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of folks who continued to follow each other to other companies either as employees or as contract work for the next few years. There were maybe one or two scary months, but overall it was manageable. (Also lesson learned: your network is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING)

Then, after about 6 months, the company funding our company just pulled out. Left us with a few bucks in the bank.

I took another dot com job about 400 miles away and got out of there. Lots of people there had no jobs after that, but a few of the smarter crew went on to huge companies like Microsoft.

The next dot com I went to, I was there through 9/11. Something inside me changed after that and I actually quit to pursue a different type of work. That dot com also went bust, but it never had any hope anyway. The owner was self-funding it with money he made from investing in dot coms - but he cashed out at the right time, and he was basically making a clone of another service. It was pretty terrible.

It was certainly a strange time.

The funny thing is, I just got hired as a contractor to work for another dot com that reminds be of those ridiculous days. At least all my eggs aren't in that basket. I hope the best for them, but the similarities are scary.

In a matter of a few hours all new IT/IS project were cancelled and budgets for IT/IS were frozen to below the minimum in all companies. It took almost a year to recover a little.

I started my career during the summer 2001. I was hired in seconds without any technical test.

All (no exception) my friends who wanted to chill during the summer before finding their first job... ended jobless for 1 full year.

Next month we moved into a much bigger office, with a lovely view and lots of space for growth - then boom, the crash (gradually) struck: the three people who'd come in after me were let go, one at a time, and the rest of us were asked to work part time - volunteering how much part of the time was. We split the office and squashed into a small part.

I worked one day on / one day off for a couple of years (maybe a bit less) while our boss scrambled for sales. He was a great guy, was very open and helpful to us all, and did eventually get the company back on its feet and eventually sold it. The five founders did well, the boss retired three years later, and even I did OK (worked for the company that bought us for eight more years, then also retired.)

Business slowed, clients missed payments, people started watching f*d.com, the first round of layoffs came, the execs did a tour and promised all was ok, the second round of layoffs came. We spend a lot of time at Starbucks contemplating plan B.

One day I came in and the laptop wouldn't connect to the network. I stick my head in my friend's office, and say "My laptop won't connect, is there something I should know?" He gets that deer in the headlights look, rushes off to check with the management, and a meeting is convened where the third layoff happens, something I'm part of and he's not (Probable cause for me being out: I didn't play ball on a traveling assignment I didn't want, was OK with the outcome. My friend hung on to the bitter end, and we laugh about it now.) The hardest day was sending back the extra paycheck the company had accidentally sent.

I started looking for jobs, but I started getting calls from friends who heard I was available for a week here, a month there, a six-month thing, etc, etc. I wound up forming an LLC and staying self-employed until decided I needed a nice safe job just before the financial crisis.

what is fd.com?

Sorry, didn't get it....

The strange thing was how suddenly it happened. It felt like the majority of projects got defunded in a matter of weeks or months. Our funding disappeared as the VC firm collapsed together with its parent company. Our customers (telcos) stopped approving any new projects that weren't guaranteed to be profitable within the quarter as they were hit by a ruinous bidding war for frequency sprectrum at the same time.

The reason why I'm saying it can never happen again (in this particular industry) is that tech/internet was a tiny and isolated part of the economy back then (called "The New Economy"). Today's tech industry is huge and very diverse. It's part of everything now. The largest corporations on earth are now tech firms. Back then, there was nowhere to go for many employees in that sector (at least for a while).

I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money, partly because I had refused to take stock options in place of proper payment. So I was able to self-fund some projects that I was interested in with a goal of creating an organically growing company. I've been avoiding the whole high growth VC culture ever since, which may have been a mistake in purely financial terms.

Web development wasn't very mature: just knowing HTML could net you a nice paycheck. You could go even farther with basic spaghetti-code skills in languages like PHP, ColdFusion, and ASP. Frameworks really weren't a thing. Javascript wasn't used for much more than form validation, so you could go to your favorite "DHTML" website and find scripts to copy.

Couple this with the high pay, and there were a TON of "developers" who were one- or two-trick ponies. Someone who honestly was better suited for sales or management were writing code and making big bucks, and assumed this was their life path. For many, they turned into developers. Many didn't, and left.

In my experience, if you knew more than one backend language, and were happy working in boring fields (often in boring locations) like travel or healthcare or energy, you probably didn't go without work for long. (I was at Sabre at the time, working in their HR department, and 9/11 affected me more than the dot-com bubble)

And then the bubble burst and the sentiment was 180 degrees opposite. By then our company had already acquired some customers and was making some money, and was ready to expand and grab a significant piece of the market. However it didn't matter what we did or what business plan we made, it was just impossible to raise any kind of money whatsoever. So our startup continued living its zombie life until it was taken over by a competitor a few years later. In the end I was lucky because this way I could survive the years after a crash while still having a job. But it left me with mixed feelings about the so called angel investors. It didn't appear to me that they had any idea what they were doing.

It was hard to know if you (as an internet application developer) would ever make a nice salary againn.

I don't think anybody thought that skilled and experienced internet application developers were going to be out of work forever.

It seemed clear that the internet had definitely solidified itself as a part of everyday life. There was going to be an internet, and things to do and buy on there, and people were going to have to build those things.

I think my main concern was how lucrative it was going to be. I briefly made $100K in my early 20s in the early 2000s with just a few years experience. Even at the time that didn't really seem sustainable.

When the crash hit, I soon went back to making $40 or $50K. That was nice enough money but I didn't know how far things were going to fall. Would the market be flooded with programmers? Would I eventually be making $25K as an experienced developer? Would I make $100K again someday?

So I worried a little bit... not too much.

There were still jobs and they were OK enough.

My view has always been that during the dot com boom, companies were so short staffed that they would basically take anyone on, regardless of their technical skill, with the hopes of training them up to learn programming. Janitor, receptionist, your weird cousin Eddie who ate glue - all of them could get a tech job if they really wanted one.

When the bubble burst, lots of people lost jobs. Both skilled people and unskilled. This was a huge darwin moment for people who'd worked at startups. Lots of people went back to whatever they were doing pre-bubble. The better people typically found work, even if it took a little while to do so.

In my view, it really did serve as a healthy shake-out of talent in the long run. This very well may happen again soon...

Lesson: if you're making good money now, save (and if you then find yourself with nothing to do which pays, try to make the best of that time by doing interesting things that you would normally not have the time to do).

It has had nothing to do with choice of technology, industry, physical location, contacts, or luck (I think).

The only common denominator I can cite is finding out what people (customers or employers) really need, figuring out how to build it for them, consistently building it, and staying friendly and helpful throughout.

Do that and nothing else matters. Don't do that and keep worrying about it. It's that simple.

Question on exercising and such. I have all exercised options, but not all vested, been here about 2 years, so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise because there was no difference between exercise price and market price.

What happens taxwise if my company goes under? Don't I only owe taxes if I sell vested options?

Early exercise with a 83b election?

You will be fine.

The tax problem happens like this:

1. Your option strike price is $0.01/sh

2. The current price as set by the board (or the stock market if public) is $10/sh

3. You exercise 2000000 shares

4. You write a check to your company 2000000 sh * $0.01/sh = $20000

The fair market value (as determined in step #2) is 2,000,000 sh * $10/sh = $20,000,000

The IRS says "wait a minute you only paid $20,000 for something that is worth $20,000,000".

The difference $20,000,000 - $20,000 = $19,980,000 was a 'gift' that requires taxes to be paid.

Now lets do the 83b election with early exercise. In that case the FMV == the strike price on the options. The difference is $0 You are paying FMV and there is no 'gift'.

The situation that caught lots of employees in the dot-com bubble is that they exercised stock options where the market price at time of exercise was a lot more than the strike price (which means an income tax liability for the difference), but then there was a lockup and they weren't able to sell the stock until after it had dropped significantly. As a result, they had tax bills that were higher than the market value of the stocks they owned.

You could argue about the morality and rationality of this decision: some people would say it's both wrong and somewhat unfeasible to levy taxes that people have no way of paying. But that's the law for now. There are other scenarios that can get people into this situation as well: cryptocurrency transactions, property taxes, wealth taxes in general. Indeed, one reason we have Prop 13 in California is because seniors were being forced out of their homes because they couldn't pay the taxes, but that brought with it a whole bunch of other undesirable economic distortions.

From the employee POV, your best options are usually to either a.) file an 83(b) election as soon as you receive the stock options, indicating that you'd like to be taxed on their current fair market value (which is usually zero at the time you receive them, because most strike prices are set at the current market price) and have all future gains taxed as capital gains with a cost basis set at the time of the 83(b) election, or b.) don't exercise your shares until you're ready to sell them.