Ask HN: How would you prepare for another “dot com” bust?
I remember the first dot-com boom that began in the late nineties. That, combined with a strong, growing US economy, the sudden need for every company to have a web presence, and the need for millions of lines of legacy code to be be tested for Y2K bugs meant that programmers were in ridiculously high demand and short supply.<p>As a result, a lot of really incompetent people were able to get jobs as programmers. It was unbelievable. I remember working with people who spent their days in a fog of confusion, stopped dead in their tracks by simple compiler errors.<p>When the bubble finally deflated, a lot of those incompetent people lost their jobs, and struggled to find new ones.<p>But by and large, the programmers at the other end of the bell curve did just fine. They kept their jobs through layoffs, or if they lost their job because a dot-com employer went belly-up, they had little trouble finding a new job.<p>So my advise is, if you strive to be a top-tier software developer, you should be able to weather any ups and downs in the job market with little trouble. Really good software developers will continue to be in short supply for the foreseeable future.