My experience applies to Dallas/Houston/Boulder, which was probably very different from Silicon Valley.
Before:
* Pay increases of 10-50% each year or two as you changed jobs.
* Finding a job was a matter of sending your resume to 1 or 2 decent recruiters, then fielding the endless calls about opportunities.
* High quality, challenging technical interviews from senior developers and engineers.
After:
* No significant pay increases anymore.
* Recruiters that never answered emails or calls (explained below).
* Low quality interviews given by hiring managers, or in some cases by contractors with little experience of their own.
* H1-B visas bringing in floods of people who largely could not solve problems and who needed to be given every solution just short of typing the code.
Prior to dot-com bust, recruiters were professionals who had a fair grasp of the technologies and industries they were involved in. They seemed to treat their jobs as actual professions rather than as temporary stepping stones to something else.
After the bust, companies reigned in their (perhaps overly aggressive) hiring and IT growth, leading to perhaps an over-abundance of recruiting firms. But at the same time, new recruiting firms emerged staffed by low (no) quality keyword-searching resume-pushing monkeys who would work for peanuts. Thus, the real recruiting firms cut staff so severely that the remaining few were buried under resumes of all the IT people displaced (let go).
Companies still had positions open, even advertising them, but hiring managers were very reluctant to actually fill those positions. Despite approvals to hire, nobody wanted to take the risk of actually spending the money on more staff.
This led to the growth in low skill H1-B labor, which further reduced the need for quality recruiters. It all became a game of numbers, a race to the lowest common denominator.
When that didn't produce positive results for industries, corporate management (who could count money but could not judge IT quality) made the next obvious step - offshoring. This further ruined the environment.
Basically there was an 8-10 year dark age in IT (unless perhaps you were in Silicon Valley... I can't speak for that). It still hasn't recovered fully, and it probably never will.
I do think there are problems with H1B visas these days... Too many go to big consulting companies (Infosys, Wipro, Tata, L&T, Satyam), but...
Your post-boom H1B claims are simply not true. The glut of H1B visas were available and used DURING the boom. For several years after 2000 the cap was not reached. In 2003 the cap was reduced to 65k (1998 levels). Your generalized claims about the quality level of H1B workers looks to be xenophobia (or worse).
In 1999/2000, H1B visas were much less flexible than they are today. People were beholden to their companies/jobs. Transferring to another job/company took 5 months. Holders had 10 days to leave the country after losing their jobs. Out-of-status one wasn't allowed to find a new job.
During the boom, enforcement of those last two things was not always strict, but afterwards it was. KICKING ALL THOSE PEOPLE OUT CAUSED THE OUTSOURCING BOOM. A well-educated workforce, familiar with the American corporate landscape, a business network in America, forced to move back, willing to apply their skills with the help of cheap local labor.
While ragging on those H1B holders, it is important to realize that THEY FILLED THE UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL SECURITY COFFERS without ever being allowed to collect (look up '40 social security credits').
It was really similar in Chicago, except I don't think H1-B was a big thing here. We seemed to jump straight to outsourcing. Might have something to do with Chicago being a finance hub and financial companies needing to cut costs after the stock market fell.
Before: * Pay increases of 10-50% each year or two as you changed jobs. * Finding a job was a matter of sending your resume to 1 or 2 decent recruiters, then fielding the endless calls about opportunities. * High quality, challenging technical interviews from senior developers and engineers.
After: * No significant pay increases anymore. * Recruiters that never answered emails or calls (explained below). * Low quality interviews given by hiring managers, or in some cases by contractors with little experience of their own. * H1-B visas bringing in floods of people who largely could not solve problems and who needed to be given every solution just short of typing the code.
Prior to dot-com bust, recruiters were professionals who had a fair grasp of the technologies and industries they were involved in. They seemed to treat their jobs as actual professions rather than as temporary stepping stones to something else.
After the bust, companies reigned in their (perhaps overly aggressive) hiring and IT growth, leading to perhaps an over-abundance of recruiting firms. But at the same time, new recruiting firms emerged staffed by low (no) quality keyword-searching resume-pushing monkeys who would work for peanuts. Thus, the real recruiting firms cut staff so severely that the remaining few were buried under resumes of all the IT people displaced (let go).
Companies still had positions open, even advertising them, but hiring managers were very reluctant to actually fill those positions. Despite approvals to hire, nobody wanted to take the risk of actually spending the money on more staff.
This led to the growth in low skill H1-B labor, which further reduced the need for quality recruiters. It all became a game of numbers, a race to the lowest common denominator.
When that didn't produce positive results for industries, corporate management (who could count money but could not judge IT quality) made the next obvious step - offshoring. This further ruined the environment.
Basically there was an 8-10 year dark age in IT (unless perhaps you were in Silicon Valley... I can't speak for that). It still hasn't recovered fully, and it probably never will.