srb4

I lost a job twice during the dotcom era and again last year during COVID. It happens even to good people sometimes due to circumstances outside of your control.

The very best way to land a new job is by networking. Follow up with former coworkers, friends, and family for leads on possible positions. They can help you get your resume in front of the right people. Last year when things weren’t looking good at my company I started reaching out to my network. With my experience and salary, I was a little worried about finding something comparable. I hooked up with a former coworker who convinced his company to open a position for me. Two weeks later I had a new job with a sizable increase in salary.

By all means look on linked in or indeed or whatever and send your resume out too, but make sure you engage your network. It really is about who you know.

Practically speaking it had little effect, but as a college student in CS during the trial it helped to solidify a very negative impression of Microsoft. The cool technologies at the time were not coming out of Redmond. UNIX/Linux, Java, and web technologies were the hot things to learn. It took a long time for Microsoft to try to earn back the trust of developers.

I thought I was going to be rich with my first job at a startup out of college but the dot com bust basically made it all worthless. Stock is great but cash would have been better.

I used to work for a defense contractor and was involved in several proposals. A similar situation happened to us. RFP was written in a way that strongly favored our product. The proposal team thought we were the only contractor that could deliver the requirements and we priced it to reflect that. We lost to a competitor we didn’t even anticipate (a new entry into the space) and who probably massively underbid us.

I don’t know anything about Amazon’s proposal or if Trump has anything to do with the decision, but I imagine they may have believed all the hype and not priced it as competitively as they should. Or perhaps they misjudged the importance of certain requirements or Microsoft’s capabilities. Regardless, I imagine this was a wake up call at Amazon.

Oh yeah, that contract we lost - we protested it and ended up getting some work out of it after all.