I wouldn’t be where I am today if those boom jobs hadn’t been there.

Same for me. My qualifications wouldn’t have gotten me a job if there hadn’t been a severe shortage of qualified people to hire, but with a few classes I managed to cram my foot in the door. The boom gave me the opportunity to learn and, most important, to prove I could do the work well.

I guess I’m not as bitter as some because I sold my stock before the crash. My dad worked in an industry that had a boom/bust cycle so I had learned the hard way that booms don’t last.

But today those 2 Web companies no longer exist, and I make six figures doing ERP work.

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.

you had a hard drive?

A hard drive? Luxury! I had to wake up in the middle of the night and start loading code into my TI-99/4A from a cassette player! Which ran on steam!

I love how he talks about the ‘internet era’ like it’s in the past.

How come everybody forgets all the people who did OK in the tech boom? 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.

Bad Penny on December 6, 2007 at 8:04 PM

Because if you adjust for real buying dollars, you would realize that you actually lost money. When you include buying power adjusted for inflation and include stock prices/values, the fact is that the tech boom was actually a wash.

- The Cat

One seems to have been overlooked here.
Janet Reno suddenly going hammer and tongs after Microsoft, as the The Clenis’s term/ride neared its end.

IOW…as soon a the bubble was no longer beneficial to Clinton, he engaged in his favorite pastime and pricked it.

Coincidence?

Did I ever tell you the story about my IBM XT with a 10MB hard drive,

you had a hard drive?

(and so the nerd bravado begins!)

Now the big companies are buying up the sites with millions of users and no revenue model. How much do I have to pay to put a movie on youtube? $0? Oh, then how much does it cost to watch them? $0? hmm.

If they can’t find a way of making a bunch of money off these social networking sites, they’ll dump them. A lot of users will be out their favorite pass time, but there won’t be layoffs across the country as a result.

Google makes money selling advertisements, and is going to crack open ads on cell phones with Android. Big untapped market with far more users than PC’s.

You were a kid then? That would make me….old…

tlynch001 on December 6, 2007 at 8:24 PM

Did I ever tell you the story about my IBM XT with a 10MB hard drive, dual 5-1/4 floppies, 256k RAM, and a 12-inch RGB monitor? I was awesome. Cost me $2,200 used.

But you only have to wander through the new startups (Check Google’s “Orkut”), to see that it’s a muncha worthless mooks stroking themselves.

How much lasting dough do mooks have? Don’t know, but I wouldn’t count on sustainable productivity.

Pet rocks. They’re all pet rocks.

…or not….?

just as the original song was being taught in school when I was a kid.

You were a kid then? That would make me….old…

The domain name alone would have been worth millions.

This will probably be worse than the burst bubble in 2001.

No, I don’t think so.

The 90s bubble was partly fueled by the explosive growth of internet infrastructure: chips, servers, modems, routers, cables, etc and the public buying PCs and getting online. Once everybody ramped up and had enough equipment, demand fell considerably, and companies that hadn’t won a big enough market share to stay in business became defunct. The other part of the bubble was dot-coms that people invested in but that didn’t pan out. Some dot coms did great – amazon, google – but many others failed.

The current bubble is in social networking sites, isn’t it? These are a really small piece of the high tech pie and even if they all went out of business tomorrow I don’t think it would have a huge impact on the economy.

Bubble answer: By selling wads of stock, and then shorting them when people start to figure out that the company isn’t really worth a 75:1 P/E ratio

Real World Answer: By selling a product or service that people want to buy.

Required reading.

“Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era”

I love how he talks about the ‘internet era’ like it’s in the past.

How come everybody forgets all the people who did OK in the tech boom? 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.