I've actually met a couple of people randomly on flights that worked as software developers until the dotcom bubble burst. They both said they couldn't find anything the following years so they changed careers: one became a carpenter and the other ended up as an accountant.

Finding work was not all that bad depending on your skill set. In fact I started doing consulting after leaving my startup. Was one of the most profitable and enjoyable times of my career. Having been through several downturns in tech I tend to view them as shifts. Early 80's personal computers -> late 80's early 90's connectivity (modems) BBS networks -> 2000 Internet etc.

Understanding and adapting to those changes are key. Next up -> IOT - computers in everything - applying AI - Biotech - ? Generally something expensive has to become cheap for the masses. Hayes modems took $1200 - $2000 devices down to <$300. Ethernet made LANs cheap. Twitter made stupidity availability massively scalable for zero dollars:)

I got laid off twice during the Dotcom bust. Remember that it dovetailed into the post-9/11 stuff too. In Q4 2001, there was just nothing. Intel and Nike were advertising web development positions for $12/hour (not a typo) and were getting flooded with applications. I ended up cold-calling various local businesses, got a freelance php/mysql contract for $20/hour, found a different perl/oracle contract for $55/hour in May of 2002, and worked my way back up from there.

Wow, $55/hour is pretty decent salary in most of the US today, kudos.

For software development, though, $55/hour doesn't seem great in 2022. I was getting $50/hr contracting back in 2002.

Yep I was getting $57/h in the spring of 2001, then the party stopped.

What do you think you’d get today for a similar contract position if you had to guess? Really curious

Sure, but it was framed as a rebuilding step 20 years ago and inflation adjusted its like $165,000/yr. Making that in the trough of a recession after a lay off seems great to me.

It was 1099, not W2. But yeah, that contract is when things started feeling "normal" again.

I got laid off about a week after 9/11 though the writing was on the wall before that anyway. I consider myself super-lucky to land a job in about a month after a lunch discussion I had with someone I knew about 3 days after I was laid off. Nothing else, including discussions with other people I knew, was leading to anything at all.

The workers hit the hardest during the dotcom bust were people who recently skilled-up in HTML/CSS and basic web design. There was a massive hiring spree for people with these skills and a huge number of those jobs completely evaporated by 2001. Many of those people ended up just leaving tech all together.

Those jobs never really came back as websites became more "Dynamic" and CMSes began to proliferate: So rather than hiring 20 web developers converting copy and design to websites you could hire a 1-3 engineer(s) to customize and run your CMS and non-technical people can provide the content.

Just a personal recollection, but the couple of years before the collapse were absolutely crazy, hiring wise.

In addition to the dotcom boom there was a ton of "Y2K bug" hiring in late 1990s. Many people who never did any programming went to a 4 week course on COBOL and were hired as programmers to fix the Y2K bug. There were, indeed, real job losses at the end of the dotcom boom, but many people who left for other fields would not, in normal circumstances, have been in the software at all. My 2c.

I had just switched from IBM 370 mainframe assembler to Java in mid-2000, worked for several months at iXL, a then-typical consulting company with high margins and correspondingly high "bling" -- elaborate office furnishings, massive plasma TVs in the conference rooms, massages, beer cart Fridays, et cetera. That got crushed in the dot-bomb, followed soon after by 9/11. I managed not to have to return to my former vertical (airline reservations), but I definitely had to scramble to stay relevant. I work at Amazon now (usual disclaimer; opinions my own, etc.).

Cisco, EMC, Sun... were all huge (and formerly profitable) companies making actual products and got absolutely hammered when dot com busted. Personally I was very lucky--got a job with a small firm whose CEO I knew well and was (at the time) still doing OK though it went through a fairly long rough patch.

But no small number of people, including many who had worked at large firms, basically left tech.

I decided to leave my job of 8 years in July of 2001 (the layoffs in tech had started by then, but really built up momentum a bit after that). At the time I was doing software development for a semiconductor company and it just seemed like after 8 years there I wasn't going anywhere and we'd recently paid off our house so I figured, what the heck, I can find another gig in 6 months, I'll take some time off. When I started looking around in Jan '02 it took several months to find a 3 month contracting gig. After that was over I decided to go back to school and get a masters degree which I did. Had a few conctracting gigs after that but steady work didn't return until '05. So yeah, my timing wasn't great, but I did get my masters degree.

> I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends..

A good reminder that economic downturns can be actually healthy for people, families, and the environment. With less money, people will drive less, travel less, drink less, eat less meat, spend more time with loved ones, etc etc

The dot com bust was a bit of a perfect storm, lots of people weren't needed because Y2K was over, lots of dumb ass startups with no product and no revenue disappeared and finally 9/11 gave everyone an excuse to chop heads because the economy was surely tanking. The first two were going to happen no matter what an the third just amplified the situation. Through all of it there was still hiring, the week I got hired the company that hired me laid off 12,000 people.

Kinda interesting that this recession was also accelerated by a violent geopolitical situation.

I don’t work in web development (and didn’t then, either), so this may vary from what others are saying. What I experienced was that there was a downturn in 2001. I was working for myself and had a contract with a Fortune 50 company. They kept us on for about 6 more months after 9/11, then let all of the contractors go. But I had other irons in the fire, so it was fine for a while.

It really hit hard about 2 years later in 2003, when all non-web contract work dried up and clients started having trouble paying for work you’d already done. That was really brutal for me, personally. I was also selling some software in addition to doing the contracting. I got really lucky and someone saw my products and wanted to license them for their particular niche. I was just barely able to hang on until a year later when things mostly returned to normal.

If it hadn’t worked out, I probably could have taken a job doing some development work I hated if I really had to. There were still openings, but they were at places like Accenture, or whatever a small-time version of them would be.