Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
I finished a masters in September 2000, by which time the wave had already started to break: I&#x27;m not sure it was a big deal anywhere other than the UK, but boo.com went under in May 2000.<p>I&#x27;d moved back home to Dorset to do my project and thesis as our landlord had sold the flat we were renting in London, and it didn&#x27;t feel like the best moment to be househunting.<p>I also had an offer in hand with a b2b eCommerce agency in London, along with a couple of other friends, so my plan had been to move back to the city in the autumn. However, over the summer we received an email from them asking us to defer our join dates by a couple of months, during which time they&#x27;d pay us a small weekly stipend.<p>This was nice because it felt like free money (I was being paid £150&#x2F;week to do literally nothing), and in the meantime I made a contact through a friend with a guy running a tiny software company in a village a few miles from where I lived and started contracting for him on a telecoms switching system. Together, these pushed my income to about £470&#x2F;week which, at the time, felt like a ton. In fact it was more than the starting salary I&#x27;d been offered with the firm in London.<p>The guy I was contracting for liked my work and started pushing me to work for him as a full time employee. He dangled matching my London salary in front of me, which obviously would go quite a bit further in sleepy Dorset.<p>Eventually I caved and gave notice to the company in London. The downside is that I had to give them the stipend back, but I&#x27;d been judicious in setting it aside just in case this happened. Still, that £1500 would have come in handy, and I still kick myself for the way this turned out because I should have seen it coming: a few days after I&#x27;d given notice and sent them a cheque they let all new starters go. The reason I kick myself is that had they let me go I could have kept the stipend.<p>On balance I was much luckier than everybody else though: I still had a job with the company in Dorset, and I was now a salaried employee, so <i>way</i> luckier than everybody who was cut. The worst I had to deal with was emergency tax for months (which I eventually got back) because the company in London couldn&#x27;t get their act together to give me a P45: I still remember the email they sent telling me it &quot;wasn&#x27;t a business priority&quot;. Well, maybe, I mean when the place is disintegrating around you, but I still need it.<p>In many ways that first job wasn&#x27;t great, but it did have some strong upsides: working on lots of different and interesting projects, client contact, 20 minute commute, good salary (for the area), great scenery. It also ranks as the only time in my career when I had my own office: the upper floor of an old thatched cottage.<p>On the downside there weren&#x27;t really any other devs in the company: a couple of guys did sysadmin work on the ISP side of the business, and built the odd website in PHP, but nothing full on. My boss was a programmer, and whilst we had some good technical discussions, he could be a bit old skool in the way he did things. I needed more people around who I could learn from. Related to this I learned that I don&#x27;t really enjoy working substantially alone.<p>My boss wasn&#x27;t a bad guy, but our relationship could be fractious, and I could be pretty immature&#x2F;something of a diva, which didn&#x27;t really help.<p>I actually handed in my notice after less than a year because the stress was getting to me, but my boss persuaded me to stay and gave me a 20% salary increase. Like I say, he was a decent guy. I&#x27;m also really glad he did that because I probably would have been <i></i><i></i>ed by my naivety otherwise (had no new job lined up).<p>Still, there was more to my issues with the job than money, so it didn&#x27;t take long to realise I still wanted to leave.<p>I began applying for jobs but the problem was there just wasn&#x27;t much around for people with a year&#x27;s experience. Plenty if you had 4 years, and obviously there were graduate roles (but these would have been a substantial pay cut and, by this time, I had car payments to make - buying a car on finance as soon as I got my first job definitely not my finest piece of decision-making ever). But I was really struggling. I&#x27;d make sure I ticked every box for every requirement when I applied for jobs, and I&#x27;d hear nothing back.<p>Eventually I heard back from a company in Cambridge that I&#x27;d applied to months before - never heard back from anyone else. Things were pretty grim at work (the atmosphere was tense and funereal and it went way beyond any issues between  the boss and I) so when I walk into this shiny, new refurbished office in Cambridge, with all these friendly people I pretty much instantly decided that regardless of what happened I <i>wanted</i> this job. Fortunately I got it, along with a modest salary increase and relocation expenses - started in June 2002.<p>Good thing too because the company I was working for in Dorset substantially imploded a few months later leaving only the boss and his wife behind, and the other three employees let go. A sad end really. It could have been awesome, it should have been awesome, but it just wasn&#x27;t. It was still limping along a decade later but I think is now gone completely.<p>Ironically I&#x27;d picked another company, in the bioinformatics sector, who weren&#x27;t exactly having a great time. They&#x27;d IPO&#x27;d, with much brouhaha, in 2000 or 2001 and had raised something like 160M euro, with a share price trading about 100 euro. By the time I arrived the shares were trading at around 3 euros and they&#x27;d burned a ton of the cash on a bunch of questionable acquisitions.<p>There were layoffs before I&#x27;d joined, and more whilst I was there, although these left the Cambridge office substantially untouched, I think mostly because we were working on a product that was making sales.<p>One immediate and massive improvement is that I got on well with my boss, and there were a bunch of great people around. I got to see other peoples&#x27; code, and be involved in some design sessions with other devs, which was all new. We also used source control - hurrah! I did lose the direct customer contact, and the variety of work, which I missed a lot from my previous job. There also seemed to be just an unbelievable (to me, at the time) amount of politicking - thinking back that&#x27;s not really surprising given the state of the company. Sadly, I realised pretty soon (a month or two in) that I needed to find another job, but I had to wait out the first year so I wouldn&#x27;t have to pay back relocation expenses.<p>My next job was a contract. I&#x27;d seen it advertised and it was paying literally twice what I was on, and it was the <i>only</i> job I&#x27;d seen in months that I seemed qualified for. I nailed all the requirements except one: I wasn&#x27;t Java certified. I phoned up the recruiter anyway and told them I was going to be taking my Java certification within the next month, then I booked the exam, then I spent every evening devouring the certification manuals. Another guy had gone for the position but decided he didn&#x27;t like one of the people there so, once I had the certification, I went for interview and got the contract (August 2003). I don&#x27;t know what the people issue was with the other guy but I had a <i>great</i> 9 months there: absolutely loved it, and loved working with a great group of devs.<p>I mean, of course, the company wasn&#x27;t in the best shape, and they sold off part of the business - the part I was involved with - to raise some cash. I had the option of following the work to Loughborough, but chose not to. It was good while it lasted but I&#x27;d already spoken with Redgate by this point, and they offered me a software engineering role starting in July 2004.<p>This was one of only two pay cuts in my career (both of which have been contract -&gt; permie transitions), but I liked them and what they were doing, so I took the job, and I stayed there nearly 10 years (that was <i>never</i> the plan, I might add - I&#x27;d only intended to stay for 2 or 3).<p>And that&#x27;s how I rode out the dotcom crash: overall I&#x27;d say I was incredibly fortunate. It set me back, but it didn&#x27;t floor me. Financially things were quite hard at times, particularly when I first moved to Cambridge, and particularly when I bought my first house a few years after that. I was lucky enough that for the most part my salary went up, but it was never like I was earning outrageous money, and certainly not compared to what I would have had I graduated in, say, 1997, and found work in the City before the crash when everybody was just desperate for developers (which I could have done had I made different choices - long, boring story).<p>Still, I&#x27;ve always been in work, except when I&#x27;ve chosen not to be myself, which is a very privileged position to be in.