[doktorhladnjak]

I graduated undergrad a few years before you in 2002 in the Bay Area. My time there included the run up and bursting of the dot com bubble. There were _plenty_ of people in my program at that time who were in it for the money or their parents wanted them in it for the money.

Since I had trouble finding a fulltime software job at the time, I ended up going to graduate school for a few years instead. That period (2002-2006) was a kind of golden era of people studying CS because they were interested in it. A popular mythology had set in for those few years that "tech was over" and studying CS was no longer worthwhile. Enrollments cratered.

By about 2006 or so, things had already began to pick up and were accelerating before the financial crisis started in 2008. There was a blip there with some layoffs and no raises, but things really started accelerating after that. More students eventually flooded back into CS programs, with increased dreams of striking it rich.