Weirdly, it had very little impact on me. I got my first dev job in December of 1998 and was let go in early 2000. Then I did contract work for O'Reilly (yes, that O'Reilly). We ported a pretty horrendous forum web app (WebBoard) written in VB to Perl on Unix. In early 2001, just as we were finishing, they announced that they were shutting down their software division.
Around early 2001 I started at a new startup in Minneapolis. It lasted less than a year, but they let us know when they were running out of money a few months out, which I appreciated. No severance though (they were really _out_ of money, I believe).
I ended up doing contract work for them after I was let go (they stayed alive for another year or so with just 3 people, down from 12). I also had some other contract work I found through a friend I'd worked with at my first position.
Eventually I joined another startup in 2004, which also went nowhere but took several years to do it. I left before they sold for a pittance because it was deeply dysfunctional.
I never felt like the crash severely impacted me. I never had any major downtime and while I didn't do contract work 40 hours a week when I was doing it, that was as much my disinterest in work as it was the work being available.
I think I was lucky enough to have the right contacts and a good rep in the Perl community, which combined to let me find a reasonable amount of work to last out the crash time.
Also, I was living in Minneapolis the entire time, which was (and is) _way_ cheaper than the bay area or NYC or any other hot tech area. I think my wife and I paid something like $1,200 a month for half of a large 3 story house (the entire first floor with 3 rooms + 2 rooms upstairs) back in 2001. I think in SF that would've gotten us a closet, maybe two.
I was also in Minneapolis.... I didn't work for a dot-com, just the USPS data center in the area, and then for a medical device company.
About the only effect of the bust I saw was that the job market went south with all the temporarily embarrassed "software engineers" seeking positions like mine (I was/am a system admin and developer among many other things).
Kept the job until the market improved somewhat, cashed in my 401k at the time (dumb) to put a down payment on a house just before the 2008 bust. Then I went to work for a University for 10 years.
The major impact of the various busts on me has been a lack of mobility (both career wise and ability to move to a new house). Other than that, not much.
I credit this to my choice of jobs (building a career) and focus in the industry, plus the fact that I've lived the role since college. I didn't become an IT guy because it was a way to get and keep good jobs... I was already one college, and I've been lucky that what I am happens to pay well.
Around early 2001 I started at a new startup in Minneapolis. It lasted less than a year, but they let us know when they were running out of money a few months out, which I appreciated. No severance though (they were really _out_ of money, I believe).
I ended up doing contract work for them after I was let go (they stayed alive for another year or so with just 3 people, down from 12). I also had some other contract work I found through a friend I'd worked with at my first position.
Eventually I joined another startup in 2004, which also went nowhere but took several years to do it. I left before they sold for a pittance because it was deeply dysfunctional.
I never felt like the crash severely impacted me. I never had any major downtime and while I didn't do contract work 40 hours a week when I was doing it, that was as much my disinterest in work as it was the work being available.
I think I was lucky enough to have the right contacts and a good rep in the Perl community, which combined to let me find a reasonable amount of work to last out the crash time.
Also, I was living in Minneapolis the entire time, which was (and is) _way_ cheaper than the bay area or NYC or any other hot tech area. I think my wife and I paid something like $1,200 a month for half of a large 3 story house (the entire first floor with 3 rooms + 2 rooms upstairs) back in 2001. I think in SF that would've gotten us a closet, maybe two.