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I was successfully freelancing and doing quite well in 1999 and 2000, and it was pretty interesting watching the wheels all come off in 2001. Here's a very subjective idea of what it felt like to me: - The bubble "burst" over about 9 months in the greater Boston area, give or take. - For about 3 months, it was nearly impossible to get hired no matter how good you were. Everyone was laying off solid senior engineers with tons of in-house knowledge, so why would they hire? - The area immediately around Boston recovered slowly, because there were just too many unemployed engineers. - My ~23yo friend who held $250,000 of stock watched it drop to almost nothing during his post-IPO handcuff period. - Any company which sold to startups, or which sold to companies which sold to startups, etc., pretty much died horribly. Huge, successful, awesome companies just evaporated. I was young and single, so I simply skipped out of the "blast zone" around Boston, waited a few months, and started applying to cool, small shops in second or third-tier cities that didn't have a huge number of unemployed programmers. Got a good job, had fun, got a bunch of raises, etc. The financial advice in the other comments is good. Make sure you have a year's cushion if you can. If you're good, you love programming, and you can relocate, you can ride out a lot. Plenty of interesting small companies are unable to hire in this market, and most will be around post-crash. Take a salary cut, get an interesting job, and help somebody make some money. |