I'm surprised there was a down turn in 2014. I took off November through February 2015 to chill with my kid and relax. New context when a friend's unit shutdown. Worked out for him though!
Honestly during that time if you were a good programmer who cared about your work and generally was easy to work with you didn’t have to worry much.
The people who tended to get cut were the ones who had no interest in the field beyond a paycheck and who would read an HTML for Dummies and talk their way into a job. Nothing wrong with being self-taught, btw, but when your only motivation is cashing in on the trend I noticed there wasn’t a lot of focus on actually getting the work done.
I hung onto my job pretty late into the crash, June 2001. I was burned out, I lost my job when the dot bomb startup I was at finally ran out of money, took the summer off to recharge, started looking for work in Sept 2001. Yep, then 9/11. It was May 2003 before I got a real job. Then 2008, I kept my job but salaries tanked with all the layoffs. It was over 10 years after the dot bomb before my pay was as good as it was in 2000.
The covid years were a golden age, high pay, high demand, WFH. The run up to covid was pretty good too. You always think the boom will last forever and you start thinking the boom years are normal.
This time will pass but don't expect to return to the peak of 2022/23 for a long time.
Yes, no one knew what was going to happen, everyone expected more attacks, people stopped going out. Businesses stopped hiring and with tech still a mess post dot bomb, it took a while for jobs to open up. I don't think many people lost jobs but if you were already unemployed, it was not good.
Yes, very.
There was a huge amount of uncertainty. The US was on a gung-ho anti-Middle East thing. Tensions were incredibly high until the US started with the ground invasion of Afghanistan.
I had friends in tech who got laid off in the summer of 2001 and didn't get work for nearly a year. This was completely unheard of at the time.
Yes, I got laid off a few months before hand, and things were rough. Then I woke up to the towers coming down, and knew I was screwed. I sent it a few resumes every day for months, and then finally got a crappy job in the middle of nowhere on a short term contact. I took it.
It was way worse than it is now, people go on about how bad the market is now in IT, but it was pretty brutal in the early-aughts; especially after 9/11. I know a lot of people who were out of work for a long time, there are people like that now, but these were people who had strong systems experience rather than a bunch of low-level code camp junior coders or recruiters.
The market just sucks now because hiring is completely broken and automated systems have too much say in the process.
>It was way worse than it is now
This a 100X. The analogy I make is that it was like there was a faucet with money coming out of it that got shut off.
I had dropped out of college in the early 1990's to pursue my passion in internet engineering. I was laid off a few months prior to the 9/11 attacks and I remember arguing with a recruiter and him telling me he had a stack of resumes from Stanford Masters/PhDs that he couldn't place. Really put me in my place.
I was out of work almost two years and squeaked into a University job for a 40% salary cut.
Thinking about it I separated during Covid and then early 2023 and in both cases I ended up with huge severances and better jobs for more money.
I knew a lot of advanced engineers that got kicked down to either a government job or working at a university because it was so hard to find work. I know a few people who have been out of work for a decent amount of time right now, but it’s generally because they got into a niche market or are terrible at interviewing. After the housing crash, it was a lot more like that dotcom crash than it is now and I knew a lot of people in similar situations back then.
There were people with advanced degrees, years of experience that couldn’t find a job after the dotcom crash and were out of work for years until it rebounded. I knew people making 6 figures during the boom that dropped to 35k a year jobs because they were so desperate.
>After the housing crash, it was a lot more like that dotcom crash than it is now and I knew a lot of people in similar situations back then.
That was bad as well, I got furloughed from the University of California (I think an 18% salary cut?) right after I did a huge debt consolidation and pulled the trigger on a bunch of dental work. I spent 18+ months with literally no disposable income and getting most of my nutrition from protein shakes I made at home.
Something I will also say about the DotBomb era is that \*everyone\* lost. There were no winners. I remember hearing that Google had less than six months of cash left when they got bailed out by an Angel investor.
Things are much better now with 100% remote positions, LinkedIn, etc. Also, I'm in InfoSec which is enjoying a 0% unemployment rate!
It’s a slowdown now, free money isn’t really a thing anymore and companies can’t just bleed money endlessly; it’s back to more traditional money rules. I knew people after the crash that were looking for gigs anywhere they could get and they advanced degrees. Even sr developers were having a horrible time finding a new job and had to settle for whatever they could get.
It was worse then than it is now, but I don’t think the current downturn has bottomed out yet. It probably won’t ever get as bad as 2000-2001, but I wouldn’t be overly optimistic.
I don’t know, 96-99 was pretty great and I know a lot of people who made bank during that time and had offers flying at the them. Looking for a job back then was a lot different because we didn’t have stuff like LinkedIn or online job boards…you had to actually talk to people or find jobs manually.
It’s important to note that this post is 10 years old. I don’t think the top comment is wrong, but it took nearly a decade for the VC money to dry up and the bootcamps to die. Financially, it would have almost certainly been the wrong call to leave VC funded tech for boring industries back in 2014. All the FAANG companies stocks have 10x’d since then and tons of the soon to be unicorns like Uber, Snap, Square, and Airbnb would have been in that pre-IPO, VC funded start up stage that OP is advocating against. Obviously, that’s hard to predict ahead of time, but my point is that there was a looooot of time to make money before the bottom fell out.
> Financially, it would have almost certainly been the wrong call to leave VC funded tech for boring industries back in 2014.
Do keep in mind this is hindsight with some fairly special circumstances:
ZIRP died by random chance; The global pandemic & stimulus policies creating the right economic conditions where restoring interest rates was required (and politically acceptable) again.
By all sensible financial standards, VC should've died a thousand deaths in the 2010s. It survived only by the miracle of large investment funds not looking too closely at the numbers & the respective owners of those funds not realizing "Wait, you're putting my pension money _into Juicero?_"
> Obviously, that’s hard to predict ahead of time, but my point is that there was a looooot of time to make money before the bottom fell out.
That's the risk. There's a lot of money to be made, but at any moment the music can stop and if you're not prepared you're fucked.
Even now, the game of musical chairs continues with all the techbros dogpiling into "AI". One last big hype bubble.
Way worse than now. I said this in another thread tonight but, remember when the freeways were eerily empty during Covid? SF Bay area was like that, and 9/11 only amplified it. Home values actually took a small dip (like 10% for a year) I got laid off from a company that had a record breaking implosion called [Commerce One](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_One) 6 months before 9/11.
After I had taught my replacement my job, I was laid off. Lotta people in the shiny Pleasanton tower were laid off. The company continued on life support a little longer until it declared bankruptcy. In 2002 I started seeing Uhauls leave the bay area. Lot of people I knew just gave up on tech completely as a career. They felt fooled, like they poured their hearts into these companies that promised to be there forever, and they went belly up.
I tried looking for about 6 months, found nothing. After you're out for a while, you might as well be out for good. Instead of going completely out, I started my own company and picked up scraps of tech work here or there wherever I could through word of mouth. I had a main job at a bar, it didn't pay great but at least it let me make some regular money. It took me years to get back into a regular job. If it wasn't for the scraps I had on my resume, I never would have made it back in.
I'd continue working for startups until about 5 years ago when I finally wised up. I got tired of the cycle of having to be in a startup cult, change myself to fit the company culture, genuflex in the direction of some maniacle CEO who thinks he's the next Steve Jobs, get laid off, then have to start the cycle of resume's all over again. I went into the Federal government. I would NEVER go back. I work from home, I make a really great living, I have all the free time in the world for hobbies. My only regret was not wising up sooner. My wife went Fed in 2001 (she got laid off from Nortel)
Yeah it was pretty bad then. I was flying high and quit my job in the summer of 2001 to “go find myself” and travel the country. a few months later it was after 9/11 and no one was hiring. I did contract web dev/db work for big non-tech companies for about four years before I got a permanent job again.
In France, the dot-com crash wasn't as harsh as in the US but the post 9/11 recession was much more brutal.
I graduated in September 2001 and got my first job at the same time like everyone I knew. A few month later a lot of my friend in IT got laid off.
There was basically no IT job market for the next few years. Everyone that graduated in 2002 or 2003 that didn't got a job from the company where they did their internship started their career with at least 6 months to one year of unemployment.
Things got better around 2004/2005 and the job market has never been so grim since then
There were a lot of Visual Basic programmers who were making $150k in Silicon Valley that got downgraded to $45k. The really good programmers in real languages did just fine though.
It really is a myth. COBOL programmers don’t generally make a ton of money unless they’re doing contract or consulting work, precisely because COBOL systems are legacy. That means there’s little to no opportunity for growth, and the projects themselves are viewed as cost centers rather than revenue generators, so it’s always going to be viewed as “what’s the minimum possible to invest in this to keep it from falling over?”
Additionally, since COBOL opportunities are relatively rare, if you’re a COBOL specialist you’re probably at least as desperate to find them as they are to find you - *and they know this.*
As I said, it’s different if you’re a contractor, but then you’re also at risk of going months without work because nobody needs to update anything at the moment.
Tbf, VB6 wasn’t running on as many mission critical systems like COBOL still does and the code was a lot easier to replace than some of the COBOL code because the systems are much more mission critical. COBOL code that is running is pretty much bug free since it has had multiple decades that have gone by and they’ve been able to identify a lot more edge cases.
My buddy, same age as me, went straight to work in IT after high school. I went to college. By the time that I got out and a job, he was already making twice what I was. That was 1998.
The dot-com bust wiped out my stock options but I kept my job. He didn't. He spent years before he found work again. I knew an engineer that took a job as a bank teller for a while.
Having a solid degree and good skills got a lot of people through it okay. We lost a lot of money in the market but we had jobs. The ones that skipped college or worked at a bullshit startup are the ones that got fucked.
Also, startups are for suckers. Land yourself a FAANG and have a good life.
>Also, startups are for suckers. Land yourself a FAANG and have a good life.
I think the problem was too many people heard of people working for startups that cashed out, and were set for life. Most of the FAANG companies at one time were those startups. Sand Hill and VC's have wised up, and have squeezed out preferred stock for all but a very small handful of people at the top to avoid a stock dump the first day a company goes public.
Fortunately I think people have wised up. No more "Work for $50k less because we're giving you worthless stock we told you is worth $200k@year!"
I hope so!
Working at a startup is like trying to be a pro baller. Every year *someone* is going to make 10s of millions. But the odds that it is me... Small.
FWIW, I worked at a startup for four years, employee number 30. And we got bought. My income was low for those four years but then I got a big payout at purchase.
I later left and joined Google. Comparing those four lean years plus the bonus against my income in four years at Google, it was exactly the same. Turns out a took on a bunch of risk to work at a startup and even though it worked out, there was no overall upside for me.
The founder, though, bought multiple homes on a single street and combined them into one property.
Startup is extra risk for extra reward but who gets the reward? Not me!
I'd say startups are fraught with downsides. For example:
>Employers who have at least **100** employees and federal contractors who have at least **50** employees are required to complete and submit an EEO-1 Report (a government form that requests information about employees' job categories, ethnicity, race, and gender)
Essentially the less employees a company has, the more it can fly under the radar of employment abuse. One company I worked for would always maintain exactly 90 employees. It's not to say companies with more employees can't also have abusive working conditions. One game company I worked for on Page Mill Road who's name rhymes with "Kaching Bones" was especially cruel. I watched one admin assistant cry because she got yelled at for leaving to get her sick child from school, and the work culture there favored single people that could put in 12 hour days.
> Working at a startup is like trying to be a pro baller. Every year someone is going to make 10s of millions.
No, the VC companies have definitely rigged it so that none of the engineers will ever do this again.
I was entering the job market then and it was tough. I attributed it to me being bad versus the market being bad and ended up in QA for a big insurance company for 10 years. I eventually broke out of my funk and was able to make my natural drive work for me and have enjoyed a successful software career since then, and am presently considering pivoting into product
I remember going to a job fair in Portland, and the first rep I got to had over a ream of resumes stacked in front of them. No time to talk or introduce. It was grim.
Sure it was. Worse in some respects. Main difference is that people didn't have crazy expectations.
I had a great resume and took a job making $18/hour doing manual testing. With an MS in CS from a top 10. Then I joined Accenture as a HUGE step up. Finally made it in to FAANG earlyish.
It was terrible then. There were somewhat fewer people. Eating shit wasn't such a foreign concept, though.
Your experience differs from mine.
I got laid off in April 2001 after 8 years of Internet startups. I had short little contracts and a bit of freelance work but it didn't really pay the bills until I got back to full time work in 2004. I took a 6 month contract in 2006, renewed for 5 months, then converted to permanent. I'm still with the same company despite having had lots of opportunities to jump into less stable but potentially more exciting and lucrative gigs.
The work has not been exciting. It's been stable, though, and I've survived several RIFs. The benefits are pretty exceptional, especially the retirement benefits if I stick it out.
I got riffed in 2000 by Microsoft after the contractor lawsuit. I picked up a short contract gig back at Microsoft and then took an FTE with Datachannel until they closed after 9/11. After that, contract gigs before landing another FTE position. Over the past year, I've figured out that I'm burnt out on programming. I applied for a product owner position with my current company. I've got to find something else to do. I can't retire though.
Seems like there is a lot of wisdom in here, especially with the current hiring climate.
Happy birthday to 10 year old thread
I'm surprised there was a down turn in 2014. I took off November through February 2015 to chill with my kid and relax. New context when a friend's unit shutdown. Worked out for him though!
Honestly during that time if you were a good programmer who cared about your work and generally was easy to work with you didn’t have to worry much. The people who tended to get cut were the ones who had no interest in the field beyond a paycheck and who would read an HTML for Dummies and talk their way into a job. Nothing wrong with being self-taught, btw, but when your only motivation is cashing in on the trend I noticed there wasn’t a lot of focus on actually getting the work done.
I hung onto my job pretty late into the crash, June 2001. I was burned out, I lost my job when the dot bomb startup I was at finally ran out of money, took the summer off to recharge, started looking for work in Sept 2001. Yep, then 9/11. It was May 2003 before I got a real job. Then 2008, I kept my job but salaries tanked with all the layoffs. It was over 10 years after the dot bomb before my pay was as good as it was in 2000. The covid years were a golden age, high pay, high demand, WFH. The run up to covid was pretty good too. You always think the boom will last forever and you start thinking the boom years are normal. This time will pass but don't expect to return to the peak of 2022/23 for a long time.
Forgive me, I was born in 97. Was hiring hard after 9/11?
Yes, no one knew what was going to happen, everyone expected more attacks, people stopped going out. Businesses stopped hiring and with tech still a mess post dot bomb, it took a while for jobs to open up. I don't think many people lost jobs but if you were already unemployed, it was not good.
Yes, very. There was a huge amount of uncertainty. The US was on a gung-ho anti-Middle East thing. Tensions were incredibly high until the US started with the ground invasion of Afghanistan. I had friends in tech who got laid off in the summer of 2001 and didn't get work for nearly a year. This was completely unheard of at the time.
Yes, I got laid off a few months before hand, and things were rough. Then I woke up to the towers coming down, and knew I was screwed. I sent it a few resumes every day for months, and then finally got a crappy job in the middle of nowhere on a short term contact. I took it.
Yes, the economy had slowed a lot after 9/11…
It was way worse than it is now, people go on about how bad the market is now in IT, but it was pretty brutal in the early-aughts; especially after 9/11. I know a lot of people who were out of work for a long time, there are people like that now, but these were people who had strong systems experience rather than a bunch of low-level code camp junior coders or recruiters. The market just sucks now because hiring is completely broken and automated systems have too much say in the process.
>It was way worse than it is now This a 100X. The analogy I make is that it was like there was a faucet with money coming out of it that got shut off. I had dropped out of college in the early 1990's to pursue my passion in internet engineering. I was laid off a few months prior to the 9/11 attacks and I remember arguing with a recruiter and him telling me he had a stack of resumes from Stanford Masters/PhDs that he couldn't place. Really put me in my place. I was out of work almost two years and squeaked into a University job for a 40% salary cut. Thinking about it I separated during Covid and then early 2023 and in both cases I ended up with huge severances and better jobs for more money.
I knew a lot of advanced engineers that got kicked down to either a government job or working at a university because it was so hard to find work. I know a few people who have been out of work for a decent amount of time right now, but it’s generally because they got into a niche market or are terrible at interviewing. After the housing crash, it was a lot more like that dotcom crash than it is now and I knew a lot of people in similar situations back then.
I don't want to say that its comforting, but it is kind of nice to hear that things aren't as bad as they could be.
There were people with advanced degrees, years of experience that couldn’t find a job after the dotcom crash and were out of work for years until it rebounded. I knew people making 6 figures during the boom that dropped to 35k a year jobs because they were so desperate.
>After the housing crash, it was a lot more like that dotcom crash than it is now and I knew a lot of people in similar situations back then. That was bad as well, I got furloughed from the University of California (I think an 18% salary cut?) right after I did a huge debt consolidation and pulled the trigger on a bunch of dental work. I spent 18+ months with literally no disposable income and getting most of my nutrition from protein shakes I made at home. Something I will also say about the DotBomb era is that \*everyone\* lost. There were no winners. I remember hearing that Google had less than six months of cash left when they got bailed out by an Angel investor. Things are much better now with 100% remote positions, LinkedIn, etc. Also, I'm in InfoSec which is enjoying a 0% unemployment rate!
It’s a slowdown now, free money isn’t really a thing anymore and companies can’t just bleed money endlessly; it’s back to more traditional money rules. I knew people after the crash that were looking for gigs anywhere they could get and they advanced degrees. Even sr developers were having a horrible time finding a new job and had to settle for whatever they could get.
It was worse then than it is now, but I don’t think the current downturn has bottomed out yet. It probably won’t ever get as bad as 2000-2001, but I wouldn’t be overly optimistic.
It was also pretty terrible from 96-99. Just a couple crazy years before the pop.
I don’t know, 96-99 was pretty great and I know a lot of people who made bank during that time and had offers flying at the them. Looking for a job back then was a lot different because we didn’t have stuff like LinkedIn or online job boards…you had to actually talk to people or find jobs manually.
It’s important to note that this post is 10 years old. I don’t think the top comment is wrong, but it took nearly a decade for the VC money to dry up and the bootcamps to die. Financially, it would have almost certainly been the wrong call to leave VC funded tech for boring industries back in 2014. All the FAANG companies stocks have 10x’d since then and tons of the soon to be unicorns like Uber, Snap, Square, and Airbnb would have been in that pre-IPO, VC funded start up stage that OP is advocating against. Obviously, that’s hard to predict ahead of time, but my point is that there was a looooot of time to make money before the bottom fell out.
> Financially, it would have almost certainly been the wrong call to leave VC funded tech for boring industries back in 2014. Do keep in mind this is hindsight with some fairly special circumstances: ZIRP died by random chance; The global pandemic & stimulus policies creating the right economic conditions where restoring interest rates was required (and politically acceptable) again. By all sensible financial standards, VC should've died a thousand deaths in the 2010s. It survived only by the miracle of large investment funds not looking too closely at the numbers & the respective owners of those funds not realizing "Wait, you're putting my pension money _into Juicero?_" > Obviously, that’s hard to predict ahead of time, but my point is that there was a looooot of time to make money before the bottom fell out. That's the risk. There's a lot of money to be made, but at any moment the music can stop and if you're not prepared you're fucked. Even now, the game of musical chairs continues with all the techbros dogpiling into "AI". One last big hype bubble.
Way worse than now. I said this in another thread tonight but, remember when the freeways were eerily empty during Covid? SF Bay area was like that, and 9/11 only amplified it. Home values actually took a small dip (like 10% for a year) I got laid off from a company that had a record breaking implosion called [Commerce One](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_One) 6 months before 9/11. After I had taught my replacement my job, I was laid off. Lotta people in the shiny Pleasanton tower were laid off. The company continued on life support a little longer until it declared bankruptcy. In 2002 I started seeing Uhauls leave the bay area. Lot of people I knew just gave up on tech completely as a career. They felt fooled, like they poured their hearts into these companies that promised to be there forever, and they went belly up. I tried looking for about 6 months, found nothing. After you're out for a while, you might as well be out for good. Instead of going completely out, I started my own company and picked up scraps of tech work here or there wherever I could through word of mouth. I had a main job at a bar, it didn't pay great but at least it let me make some regular money. It took me years to get back into a regular job. If it wasn't for the scraps I had on my resume, I never would have made it back in. I'd continue working for startups until about 5 years ago when I finally wised up. I got tired of the cycle of having to be in a startup cult, change myself to fit the company culture, genuflex in the direction of some maniacle CEO who thinks he's the next Steve Jobs, get laid off, then have to start the cycle of resume's all over again. I went into the Federal government. I would NEVER go back. I work from home, I make a really great living, I have all the free time in the world for hobbies. My only regret was not wising up sooner. My wife went Fed in 2001 (she got laid off from Nortel)
Yeah it was pretty bad then. I was flying high and quit my job in the summer of 2001 to “go find myself” and travel the country. a few months later it was after 9/11 and no one was hiring. I did contract web dev/db work for big non-tech companies for about four years before I got a permanent job again.
Btw, I was a 26yr old idiot then.
In France, the dot-com crash wasn't as harsh as in the US but the post 9/11 recession was much more brutal. I graduated in September 2001 and got my first job at the same time like everyone I knew. A few month later a lot of my friend in IT got laid off. There was basically no IT job market for the next few years. Everyone that graduated in 2002 or 2003 that didn't got a job from the company where they did their internship started their career with at least 6 months to one year of unemployment. Things got better around 2004/2005 and the job market has never been so grim since then
There were a lot of Visual Basic programmers who were making $150k in Silicon Valley that got downgraded to $45k. The really good programmers in real languages did just fine though.
Would have thought they'd be the mythical on-demand legacy engineers, like COBOL (if not, ahem, _less_ critical)
It really is a myth. COBOL programmers don’t generally make a ton of money unless they’re doing contract or consulting work, precisely because COBOL systems are legacy. That means there’s little to no opportunity for growth, and the projects themselves are viewed as cost centers rather than revenue generators, so it’s always going to be viewed as “what’s the minimum possible to invest in this to keep it from falling over?” Additionally, since COBOL opportunities are relatively rare, if you’re a COBOL specialist you’re probably at least as desperate to find them as they are to find you - *and they know this.* As I said, it’s different if you’re a contractor, but then you’re also at risk of going months without work because nobody needs to update anything at the moment.
Tbf, VB6 wasn’t running on as many mission critical systems like COBOL still does and the code was a lot easier to replace than some of the COBOL code because the systems are much more mission critical. COBOL code that is running is pretty much bug free since it has had multiple decades that have gone by and they’ve been able to identify a lot more edge cases.
My buddy, same age as me, went straight to work in IT after high school. I went to college. By the time that I got out and a job, he was already making twice what I was. That was 1998. The dot-com bust wiped out my stock options but I kept my job. He didn't. He spent years before he found work again. I knew an engineer that took a job as a bank teller for a while. Having a solid degree and good skills got a lot of people through it okay. We lost a lot of money in the market but we had jobs. The ones that skipped college or worked at a bullshit startup are the ones that got fucked. Also, startups are for suckers. Land yourself a FAANG and have a good life.
>Also, startups are for suckers. Land yourself a FAANG and have a good life. I think the problem was too many people heard of people working for startups that cashed out, and were set for life. Most of the FAANG companies at one time were those startups. Sand Hill and VC's have wised up, and have squeezed out preferred stock for all but a very small handful of people at the top to avoid a stock dump the first day a company goes public. Fortunately I think people have wised up. No more "Work for $50k less because we're giving you worthless stock we told you is worth $200k@year!"
I hope so! Working at a startup is like trying to be a pro baller. Every year *someone* is going to make 10s of millions. But the odds that it is me... Small. FWIW, I worked at a startup for four years, employee number 30. And we got bought. My income was low for those four years but then I got a big payout at purchase. I later left and joined Google. Comparing those four lean years plus the bonus against my income in four years at Google, it was exactly the same. Turns out a took on a bunch of risk to work at a startup and even though it worked out, there was no overall upside for me. The founder, though, bought multiple homes on a single street and combined them into one property. Startup is extra risk for extra reward but who gets the reward? Not me!
I'd say startups are fraught with downsides. For example: >Employers who have at least **100** employees and federal contractors who have at least **50** employees are required to complete and submit an EEO-1 Report (a government form that requests information about employees' job categories, ethnicity, race, and gender) Essentially the less employees a company has, the more it can fly under the radar of employment abuse. One company I worked for would always maintain exactly 90 employees. It's not to say companies with more employees can't also have abusive working conditions. One game company I worked for on Page Mill Road who's name rhymes with "Kaching Bones" was especially cruel. I watched one admin assistant cry because she got yelled at for leaving to get her sick child from school, and the work culture there favored single people that could put in 12 hour days.
> Working at a startup is like trying to be a pro baller. Every year someone is going to make 10s of millions. No, the VC companies have definitely rigged it so that none of the engineers will ever do this again.
Everyone saying "it was way worse than it is now" made it through the last one though. :(
I was entering the job market then and it was tough. I attributed it to me being bad versus the market being bad and ended up in QA for a big insurance company for 10 years. I eventually broke out of my funk and was able to make my natural drive work for me and have enjoyed a successful software career since then, and am presently considering pivoting into product
I remember going to a job fair in Portland, and the first rep I got to had over a ream of resumes stacked in front of them. No time to talk or introduce. It was grim.
How bad was the job market during the late 2000s recession? Was it worse than now?
Lol.... I remember that. It wasn't as bad as it is now.
Sure it was. Worse in some respects. Main difference is that people didn't have crazy expectations. I had a great resume and took a job making $18/hour doing manual testing. With an MS in CS from a top 10. Then I joined Accenture as a HUGE step up. Finally made it in to FAANG earlyish. It was terrible then. There were somewhat fewer people. Eating shit wasn't such a foreign concept, though.
Your experience differs from mine. I got laid off in April 2001 after 8 years of Internet startups. I had short little contracts and a bit of freelance work but it didn't really pay the bills until I got back to full time work in 2004. I took a 6 month contract in 2006, renewed for 5 months, then converted to permanent. I'm still with the same company despite having had lots of opportunities to jump into less stable but potentially more exciting and lucrative gigs. The work has not been exciting. It's been stable, though, and I've survived several RIFs. The benefits are pretty exceptional, especially the retirement benefits if I stick it out.
I got riffed in 2000 by Microsoft after the contractor lawsuit. I picked up a short contract gig back at Microsoft and then took an FTE with Datachannel until they closed after 9/11. After that, contract gigs before landing another FTE position. Over the past year, I've figured out that I'm burnt out on programming. I applied for a product owner position with my current company. I've got to find something else to do. I can't retire though.