July 24, 2005

• Life was better for me then. I miss the illusions. Thought I was meant for a fabulous career in IT...
• I'll be interested to see how your recollections and mine match up, rolypolyman. I remember driving past drkoop.com and garden.com on my way to work! Some houses in North Austin are still for sale from the original rounds of Dell layoffs, though not everyone from California went back home. I'll not even get into the Intel Building, except to share this blast from the past.
• Oooh yeah. Straight from earning starvation wages ineptly trying to run a web design business from home (with no business experience or aptitude) to working for an Ericsson offshoot in a luxury office on the top floor of one of the biggest skyscrapers in town and earning waaaay more than I ever had before or have ever since (and indeed waaaaaaay more than I was worth at the time). Casual office rules - beer and network games with friends late into the night with that spectacular view over the city. Fully funded office parties. Impressing girls with money (or at least attempting to) - quite a novelty for me. Buying the motorbike I'd always wanted. Good times. No, bloody *great* times. Then, the creeping sense that the great times were inevitably going to come to an end. Our clients going out of business one by one. Rumours of impending layoffs at Ericsson. Then the attempts to offload the company to someone else. The end seemed to come quickly. It was soon apparent that there would be no last-minute saviour. Morale dropping, meaningful work basically halting. Lots of aimless surfing of employment sites - almost bare of IT jobs by that stage. Within six months the company was closed and we were all layed off. A couple of weeks later my motorbike was stolen, uninsured.
• (comments from non-IT people are welcome, too, as I'm curious if the "good life" rubbed off on others. FWIW I was not in the IT field at the time)
• My good times pre-dated the dot com era. I was a part of the "virtual reality" era. The company that I worked for had stocks go from $5 dollars a share to over $1000 per share. Of course it went back down to less than a buck a share very, very quickly. Nonetheless, I am an expert in VR experiences and also had a career in computer games due to this part of my resume. I have to say, even as movies are a harder business, they are much more fun. Give me a good linear story over a self chosen "VR" story any day.
• "Hey, remember that guy I told you about, the (nationality) guy? He's starting this company for business to have their homepages in; he needs graphics people to make them... yes, here's his phone.." Handshakes. Mission/vision statements. "I want some globe, some world image, lots of pictures..." Buttons, buttons. "Yes, I need an specific icon for every single one of the 32 categories..." Stationery. CD-ROMs. Animated GIFs. "Sure, take another modem, I've set you up 6 email addresses and 10Mbs of web space... oh, yes, bring her tonight, we need the clients to see a lot of staff at the party..." "No problem. I'll wedge it into expenses. Sure, anytime. Merry Xmas!" He needs to see a printout of the page. They need printouts of the images, the icons, of the animations. They don't see the page on their machines the way it looks here. Images don't load instantly like in our T1, like in the TV ads... "I'm a web page designer. You've heard of the internet? I can get you your own electronic mail address..." "Oh, cool!" They want the same photos they saw on (sports company)'s ad. They want more animation on the 10 intro pages. They saw video on (big company's site) and they want the CEO's 15 min. welcome speech on their page. They want interactivity. They want music, flashing texts, games, VRML, QT3D. They want to be able to track user's bookmarks. They want load time to be zero. "Ah, next (IT trade event), I'll rent the place for the whole company. You saw (employee) when he got drunk and wanted to marry that dancer? Ha!" "Yes? No, he's not here... not, either. Have you tried extension 228... what? The database... no, I just do graphics here... no, I don't know..." "They can't pay now, but they're offering some bartering/exchange program... yes, they need it designed and up next weekend. I mean, this weekend. Sure, bring her in". Downloading all those Gutemberg project books, never to be read. All those programs, all those songs, all that porn. Discovering there's a worldwide community that shares your specific interest/foible/fetish/hobby. All the newsgroups, all the email friends, all the resumés, all the CD-Rs. Long nights chatting, surfing, waging IRC wars, oogling on CuSeeMe... "Say, can you get some students from your old school? We need more hands here. Yes, tell them that." "Look, take those modems, and that router if you want. Can't get any cash right now. (Insurance company) has been cutting me cold, they owe 6 months of hosting..." "Hey, have you seen (company)'s page? Why are they using your graphics...?" "Nope, mine bounced, too. Where's (company founder)?" "They disconnected THE PHONES!" ***** NO CARRIER Yes, we all got burned, one way or the other. A few made it big, some of us diverted or returned to fields more suited to our skills. Still, it's great to remember the thrill of seeing for the first time color graphics on a Mosaic browser screen. Of holding one of those rectangular Sun machines in one hand. That day you saw your imagery available to the entire world. And you even got paid for it! For a while, at least...
• I have no recollection of the dotcom era and I am only slightly sure that I even know what it was. I certainly was not aware that it was going on while it was going on.
• What was the documentary that some guy was making of his friend (or brother, or brother-in-law or something) growing his business, only to see the dotcom business fail miserably and have the whole process documented and released in cinemas? #2 went literally straight from university in little old Christchurch to embedded software engineer for a Motorola subsidiary in Santa Cruz. We got married the day before flying out to California, went from essentially living on my office-manager income to him earning US$60k (to start with) or more a year, plus options and bonuses. It wasn't real, it was an adventure, we had a blast and saw the world (or at least bits of it), I shopped at Macy's and did the geek widow thing and volunteered all over the place and went back to school while #2 did eighteen-hour workdays at crunchtime and had liquid lunches during quiet periods. When we arrived fresh from NZ, the head of HR took us shopping for appliances, throwing a washer, TV and lounge suite on the company's gold card. We got a US$12k moving allowance that we only had to pay back if #2 quit within the first year. The first year, the company threw huge family picnics every summer and booked out the local cinema for staff on Friday afternoons, we got free use of the company gym and tennis courts. In his second year the company stopped inviting spouses and partners and families to staff picnics and dinners, stopped renting out cinemas and closed up the gym. The days were still long, we still got to travel, but rumours abounded about layoffs, cutbacks, shifting to a smaller building, being sold off. The old GM formed a new company and headhunted a bunch of talented coders. It was late 2002 when the company finally admitted they had no good products to offer Motorola -- they hadn't for a couple of years by then anyway. Instead of movies on Fridays, the managers were holding staff meetings at which they denied any impending layoffs, but everyone knew they were scoping out new, smaller offices down the road. Pretty textbook, I think. #2 was laid off in January 2003, but I'd already gone back to NZ by then. He was left to finish up his job, sell off our belongings and ship what was left. We came home with a hefty redundancy payout and some pretty good stories to tell, so it was all good. One friend, an ex-coworker at the company, is now a mortgage agent, and another is finishing a degree in social work - but neither of them were coders, they sort of got into the business by accident. Pretty much everyone else is still in IT, still earning a crazy amount of money, fortunately headhunted by saner employers.
• Sorry, but I was still recovering from the yuppie days: actually going to university, with my nose to the grindstone, sleeping, making babies. It paid off, but I missed the rollercoaster ride you all enjoyed.
• I once met a dude who was actually a internet millionaire, from Ebay options. He had a McLaren F1. His fiance was trying to hit on me, I think. I'm sure there's a point in there somwhere.
• Was mature enough (and burnt often enough) to know it was BS at the time. Was surprised that it lasted as long as it did. Knew a number of people who spouted the most arrant twaddle about businesses they were going to start, and who airily dismissed any objections. Am gloomily aware I am now Old Enough to Know Better, which is Bad Sign.
• Worked for a company that stole its own internal resources to 'create' a new 'e-business' without any real idea of how the actual process would work - betting on the idea that they thought they'd be bought up. With 18 months the 'e-idea' died and so did the company.
• i was working in dublin, where the dot com boom was accompanied by a general employment boom. one of my overriding memories is the amount of time i spent interviewing people because the company i worked for wanted to expand but there was enormous competition for workers. some weeks, i'd spend more than 50% of my time in interviews. we made offers to a number of people i wouldn't go near today - and some of them even turned us down because they got better offers elsewhere ☺ it was a fantastic market for employees, and a great time in general for information technology. i find that things have swung quite far in the other direction now, with some companies i know refusing salary raises over several years in order to adjust from the extravagances of those years.
• Having a row with my unreasonable boss. 30 mins later the phone goes and it's a friend of a friend I've met twice telling me the company he works for needs me. Just me, not someone else, but me. Being offered a 50% pay rise and being told I'd regularly fly to New York. Six weeks into the new job discovering that the project I was working on wasn't backed up by a contract with the client and the client had changed their minds. Twiddling my thumbs. Rapidly discovering that my new boss could talk the hind leg off a donkey and then persaude it to run a marathon but was a control freak who wouldn't delegate and couldn't run a company. Not flying to New York. Getting slightly suspicious as we moved into plush new offices despite having lost a couple of clients. Seeing more clients go. Getting made redundant along with 90% of the company. Six months freelancing at wages half what I'd originally been earning. Eventually taking a bloody awful job on the original salary as cos I couldn't afford to wait any longer. Realising that the people I was working with were nearly all arseholes but I was learning incredibly useful skills at the cutting edge of new technology. Eventually leaving the arseholes behind and moving towards a rewarding, satisfying job (but still not getting a pay rise ... !). So an incredible adventure and I'm glad I did it.
• Poor then, poor now. Had that awful creeping feeling that someone, somewhere, somehow was actually making enough money to live on, just not me. That feeling is still present. But my younger brother had a groovy dot com job & scoffed at me for taking a vow of poverty and working in museums. Now we're both unemployed. Go figure.
• For better or worse, I missed most of the boom because I was still in school. Though we did get the full brunt of the crash. 6 months before I graduated, I was getting flown out for interviews with companies whose names end in "!", and after graduating, I think 10% of us had jobs. While we were in school, I had this overwhelming feeling of "yeah, now is finally our time." Because having done one or two internships per year, you were beaten with this idea that you had to "pay your dues" for years before you advanced to any level of respectability. In my field there was very much an old guard that were these giants, old white men who kept an apprenticeship system in place for no reason other than that's how they moved up. So when the internet started becoming hot, I eagerly believed all that was said about the old rules not applying anymore. It all got sorted out though. I learned that even during the worst of it, there were people skipping all the bullshit and finding their own path--it was the fact that this was offered to a whole class of people without regard to their differing talent. It wasn't what all the old grumps were saying, "kids shouldn't be making 6 figures right out of school"; well, some kids definitely should, but everyone was expecting it, that was the problem.
• What sums up the boom and bust of the dot coms for me is the spectacle that was Digital Enterainment Network. What a business model. A truly f*cked company.
• I went to work for the sales arm of a Japanese mainframe computer and dasd manufacturer in 1985 and stayed till I became redundent in 1998. My closest approach to dotcomitude was driving to work down Central Expressway and seeing startups like Yahoo!, and thinking that that's were the cool kids with their web cams are. But the bubble did have an effect. Even as an accounting/finance weasle, I made 6 figures in my last several years there, since salaries were pegged to the competition. And, one of the factors in competing for the cool kids was having a great company cafeteria. We went from an ok place run by a middle eastern family (they did make great falafels, but the rest was pretty boring)to a professionally run cafe with grill, great main dishes, sandwich and salad bars, pizza oven, scones, bageles, cookies, ice cream, outdoor barbeques once a week, and espresso machine. (I still miss the huge cafes lattes, which were hot enough to cure bronchitis if you had it.) When it became apparent that mainframes were not the wave of the future, and the dotcom bubble had burst, the company went through a series of layoffs while they tried to figure out how to make a profit. Finally, it occured to them that replacing 6 figure weasles might help. It was great fun while it lasted.
• Great thread. As a total non-tech person, I am keenly interested in your experiences. The whole phenomenon is fascinating, because I really don't understand it.
• I graduated college just around when the mania peaked. I remember being intensely jealous of my friends who were hired straight out of school at ridiculous salaries, and a year later having more than a touch of schadenfreude as their company collapsed around them. They had teased me for going into finance instead of getting a job in tech - all of them are now back in school getting PhD's in something esoteric, while I've been employed since the summer we graduated. Still, I do wish I'd have been along for the ride with them instead of taking the safer path. I'd probably have had a lot more fun, and be a little wiser now, albeit a lot poorer.
• I got hired to my first "real" job at Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment on the tail end of the boom in early 2001. There was a site called screenblast that was classic dot com (crappy online "entertainment" theoretically supported by advertising) despite being created by a humongous corporation. THEM: (at interview) How much salary do you want? ME: Um, how about 60? THEM: How about 76? ME: OK. I got made a "software engineer" despite having no OOP experience and having applied for web developer. Needless to say I got laid off 9 months later. That was 2002 and I am still yet to secure another full-time job (been doing contract ever since), although I am close now and I dont really care that much b/c it's not what I want to do with my life. We didnt have too many excesses, but we did have "beer Friday," which continued even after a guy got drunk, got on the freeway going the wrong way, and killed some people and almost himself.
• I was still in undergrad during the boom, at its Canadian hub (Ottawa - think Nortel, JDS). I remember taking the long, hard road to a degree in mechanical engineering, while my software eng friends were being encouraged to quit school early and offered giant signing bonuses. I can tell you, when the crash came, I enjoyed a little bit of shadenfreude.
• Hey Tracicle, when I unsuccessfully tried to emigrate to NZ last year, it seemed that NZ was desperate for IT workers (not so much demand for musicians apparently- doh!). I somehow imagined that some kind of mini dot com phenom was going on there. I was wondering if you guys had managed to capitalize on that apperent trend at all on your return? On the Emigrate NZ forum I was haunting at the time, I repeatedly saw foreign IT guys (Brits mostly) typically getting hired in their first interview and some even over the phone from the UK.
• I was in telecom but it was part of the same lunatic party. Some random memories: * ordering new office furniture for the department: The officially sanctioned option, Aeron chairs at $800 a pop. * was lucky to be part of a great software design team so it was a ton of fun...was unlucky in that our product segment was too competitive, so in the end it wouldn't last. * blackest comedic moment - boss started quoting Star Trek TNG. Yes, he actually said "make it so!" at the end of a meeting once. * talking to a coworker who said yeah, a million dollars would be nice but really you gotta have five million to be comfortable. * knew the boom wouldn't last so decided to short sell some dot com stocks. But i was too early (1999) and ended up losing almost $200K. * we had good times that spanned probably five or six years. Then at the end (2000), they wanted us to spin our department off as a startup. Hooray! As part of the management team, we were to have everyone sign off on impossible schedules. At a R&D kickoff meeting i was supposed to stand up and lie about how long some critical projects were going to take. I refused and was handed the parachute. Walking out the door I was sad to leave my buddies behind, but also OTOH, i've never been so relieved. * in late 2000, i was interviewed in Florida and New York. Without exception the hiring companies were lying to themselves, consciously or unconsciously over their prospects and their abilities. They're all dead and buried now. * happy ending despite everything, the startup failed but all my buddies got rehired and are doing well. Me, I squirreled away some of the freely flying lucre and now by paring expenses way down, i can do something i always wanted to do which is to write. I still miss the crazy days sometimes though. The ones before the dishonesty.
• kamus, so many of our qualified IT workers still head overseas in search of better money that it's really hard to find employees. And we do have a fairly large and stable IT industry (relative to the size of the country). Unfortunately our economy is such that no one can afford to compete salary-wise with employers in the UK and US. Plus it's in our culture to travel, usually to the "mother country" and work, so there's a shortage in many key industries -- health and education, for example. Maybe you should reapply as a music teacher. :)
• cynnbad, maybe this will explain it. A commentator on the stock market bubble that happened at the same time said something like, 'of course they were optimistic. Everyone was on Prozac.' Well, maybe the dotcomers weren't all on happy pills, but I do think they got caught up in the then current meme that a nerdy good idea would sell to the internet at large, where the majority of the population at the time were using AOL.
• I miss the millenium bug.
• path: The boundless optimism infected many of us, myself included. As it turned out, my story had a happy(ish) ending, so I'm inclined to feel that the naive faith in the potential of technology and the market was one of the most worthwhile aspects of the whole period. Several of us were undaunted and still optimistic enough when we all got sacked to immediately get together, come up with a new idea, and get our own startup started up. It was an awful time to be trying to start a company - Australia's business world is extremely risk-averse at the best of times - and absolutely no one had any faith in the IT business in late 2000, especially in something as risky as a new internet technology (and running on that hippie Linux shit to boot!). Nearly five years of struggle later I'm the only one left out of the original group from our old company, but we now have a great product, clients, investors and a viable business. No one stepped up to give us the wads of cash, Aeron chairs and cushy offices that they might have five years ago, and we all went for nearly two years without any real income at all, but if I hadn't had my horizons changed by the boom years I never would have stuck it out, and I'm glad I did. Apologies for rambling on - they're mostly fond memories. Great post rolypolyman, thanks. I'll shut up now.
• Tracicle, the doc you mentioned was called appropriately enough: "dot.com"... I haven't seen it but i hear it's good! Can't resist adding other black humor story: My buddy worked for one of those insane telecom startups. Their management philosophy was that if a software project realistically takes a year, we can pretend it'll take three months if we flog the workers four times as hard!. Wow, what a concept! Anyhow my buddy biked to work everyday. On this one bad morning, he was attacked by a swarm of bees (!). So covered with bee stings, he hobbled to his desk and asked his manager for leave....and was refused! Instead he had to sit there and pretend to write code, while swelling up.
• Nice vignettes Flagpole and others... In 1996 I was an anthropology dropout with no formal experience using computers -- though, like many people I now work with, I grew up playing with them, learned BASIC, typed machine code into a hex editor from the back of "Programming the 4032". Through a series of lucky breaks and helpful mentors I managed to swing a job in the accesible technology field, in the bay area, where I was then able to tap in to "the Boom." Signed on as an apprentice at a s/w developers' "Workers' Cooperative." I worked out of my apartment in a pre-gentrification part of East Oakland, smoked enough weed to believe the hype. We mostly communciated by email and phone, so a week might go by where my longest live conversation was "Tall Italian mocha java to go, please." Wake up at 5, spit out code til 9 or 10, spark up, go rollerblading or wandering on the beach, start coding at 7 or 8, work til 3. Never got paid, but gained my "california credentials" Long story short, I missed the midwest. The boom brought me and my weak resume back to Madison. I worked a good job until the bubble went bust. I had been looking for a new job closer to my 80 acre dream, and the day I got my first offer (10K less than what I had been making) I had seen the headline "LUCENT LAYS OFF 3,000!", so I took it. 5 years later I'm just about where I left off, but I'm on my 80 acres, still no degree, but pretty happy doing what I do, if a little nervous about what comes next.
• I got a job fixing y2k bugs in cold fusion, knowing absolutely nothing about web development. My friend helped me get the job fresh out of college. I quickly learned asp, RDBMS, app ops, java/j2ee over the next couple of years. I had a fridge full of beer next to my desk, a disco ball and beaded curtains. We played foosball 2 hours a day and had the 'mars attacks' pinball machine. I remember starting out at less than $30K/year and then getting a 40% raise in 6 months. I never got a raise less than 15%. When stuff went bad, it went bad pretty fast. However, I was pretty lucky. I used my time to learn as much as I could, we had a bunch of really good/smart programmers and I was like a sponge. I was out of work for 9 months and had to move back into my parents house for 6 months. Those were definitely bleak days. I took the opportunity to find work in new cities and start a mobile software development company. 2 years after I got laid off I'm a senior software consultant making more than I thought I ever would. I went to school for molecular biology and now I'm a pretty decent software engineer. Currently, I'm starting my own company and going for the 1099 contracts. The opportunity gave me a chance to prove I could do anything I wanted with a little effort on my part and being surrounded, when I started, by decent senior level developers that didn't mind lending me a hand.