[lmarcos]

For those who didn't experience the dot com bubble: how long did it last? I remember that I was studying computer science in university back in 2005, and everyone agreed in that time that that was a career with future. I knew some software engineers back then who were making good money and jobs (although not as much demanded as nowadays) weren't scarce precisely.

[marcus0x62]

It was pretty bad until ‘03, or so, but there were profitable businesses that people flocked to. I worked for a small ISP at the time (the entire bubble/post bubble era) and we bought a lot of equipment and sometimes customer bases off of failed, venture-backed providers.

As an aside, I remember two instances that made me think this is a bubble:

1) We were having some HVAC work done at our data center, and one of the contractors kept asking if I had any “hot” stock tips and shared some he had heard previously about some idiotic .com startup (I don’t remember the exact company, but it was near pets.com levels of stupid.)

2) As a small company that didn’t pay particularly well, we went through a bunch of sales reps, and usually hired people with no telecom/ISP sales experience. One day, we hired two of the best reps from Worldcom. I asked them why they came to work for us and they said they felt like Worldcom was going to implode due to all the fraud going on: sales reps switching their customers between the MCI and Worldcom billing systems every month (which, apparently would trigger a new commission payment) and a coworker of theirs who just suddenly started getting paid $20k per month in commissions, despite not having sold anything. They said the guy tried for months to do the right thing and return the money, but after being told again and again the payments were correct said screw it, bought a sports car and started dating a stripper.

My biggest investing regret is not trading on these realizations — not Worldcom specifically, but the market as a whole. It was like a lightbulb went off about how crazy the whole industry was about six months before the bottom fell out, but I didn’t act on that knowledge at all.

[evouga]

I graduated ‘07. Computer science was seen as a reasonable, but sub-optimal, career path in terms of money and job opportunities. If you were optimizing for career you did pre-med. The CS classes were small (30 students) and consisted of people who were passionate about the field irrespective of making less money than doctors or other engineers.

Today the same school has huge classes (300 students) and many don’t have much talent or passion for the subject, but have been told that “people who want good jobs do CS.” It’s true new pre-med, in other words.

[aeonik]

I graduated from highschool at this time and I checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to help pick my degree. Computer disciplines and health disciplines dominated the top 10 most projected growth and top salaries at the time.

If I recall correctly, "Computer Systems Analyst" was one on the top of the computer-related jobs.

[effingwewt]

CSA was a high paying well respected job as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.When I graduated and for a few years after it was still at the top, though software jobs had been moving away from CSAs, so you ended up with a bunch of people who couldn't get decent paying jobs in the field.

Back then the meme was L2Web Design.

It quickly overtook CSA and became the hot new fad, but the bubble burst fairly quickly, and now again you have people out of work and all competing for the same few jobs.

I watched so mamy web designers, real estate agents etc scramble to find some kind of work they could do that would pay close to what they'd been making.

In the end, most made career changes.

Here we are again and it's worse. Companies infantilzed their workforce, got them to expect pay of probably 10x what they are actually worth, and now they may have to join the 'real' workforce and get an actual job.

The movie Fun With Dick and Jane explores this very well even though it's technically a comedy, it holds so much truth its scary.

[cudgy]

Salaries have been relatively stagnant for most software developers since the late 1990’s boom. Kids straight out of school were then getting 80–100k to start in mid market cities like Atlanta and Raleigh/Durham where you could buy a nice house for $160k. Many Silicon Valley salaries were in the mid 100k range and you could buy a home for 400-500k.

Many other jobs, on the other hand, have seen significant boosts in salary and many business careers have much higher top end potential than software development careers. My main point is that I disagree with the general opinion that software development is a slam dunk for people starting new careers.

I am encouraging my children to focus on their reading, writing and language skills over tech skills for their future, as they can always easily get into tech with the multitude of high level languages and mostly CRUD / web development that dominates the industry now. True CS skills are rarely needed.

[germinalphrase]

“…and many business careers have much higher top end potential than software development careers.”

What career paths fall in this category in your opinion?

[monkeybutton]

I started studying computer science in 2007 and professors were remarking that it was the first year enrollment was back up pre-dotcom bubble levels.

Edit: there's probably some rough times coming for the glut of coding boot camps and learn to code MOOCs.

[ghaff]

Enrollment probably lagged recovery a bit. Without studying graphs and so forth, I'd say things were getting back to a fairly even keel by 2004 or so in general.

>learn to code MOOCs

The VC phase of MOOCs and any great hopes for rethinking education access already pretty much flamed out. What's left is an often good and inexpensive educational resource but it's not much of a business anyway for the most part.