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...)