Even without stock options, after the boom I was still better off than I would have been without the boom. Forget about the stocks, the boom created jobs. Lots and lots of well-paying jobs. Yeah, I got laid off in 2003, along with 1/2 my co-workers and millions of other workers. Big deal. It’s the business cycle.

You know… your post got me thinking, so bear with the long-ish post.

For most of the boom I worked for a big-time equipment maker. Then I heard the siren song of a pre-IPO startup (lots of salary and lots of stock options). Flash-forward a year and the startup folds, I’m out of work for most of the next two years, picking up contract work here and there. Most of my friends in the industry are also out of work at some point during the time between 2001 and 2004.

How does this relate to today’s industry? It doesn’t, I don’t think. Like another poster said, the first boom was driven by demand for bandwidth (both in business and in the home), and the dot-coms. The need for bandwidth ended almost at the same time as the more dubious dot-coms started failing, which is what caused the bubble to burst (real smart on my part to go work on a next-generation router when no one was buying the current generation routers anymroe). I remember vividly the day that Lucent’s stock cratered and we (this was when I was at the big equipment maker) were all congradulating ourselves for not being Lucent. Six months later everyone’s stock started tanking. Add to this the caliber of people that had been hired to fill talent who were wooed by pre-IPO startups wasn’t nearly of the quality of the people who left, and were of course the first ones to get laid off.

So what about now? Social networking sites can actually sell advertising due to having millions of visitors daily. Advertising revenue is much more solid than basing stock prices on phantom sales of phantom products. Plus there’s no huge demand for routers and switches this time, at least not that I can see (I’m in software now, not hardware). And the people that are being hired are quality people, for the most part. My company isn’t hiring people simply to fill chairs, only to lay them off six months from now. The signs of the crash that were there before simply aren’t there this time.

I am better off than I was when the start-up folded. All my friends who have landed on their feet with good jobs. Even though we aren’t getting paid what we got during the boom, we all have good paying jobs. Plus, everyone realizes that salaries were rediculously overinflated during ‘99 – 2001.

The boom gave me valuable experience and opportunities that I needed for my current job, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if those boom jobs hadn’t been there.

crazy_legs on December 7, 2007 at 11:48 AM