What were you doing when the bubble burst?
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
Well, I was too stupid to realize I could become an instant millionaire on the web in the mid 90s building a site. I was also too stupid to realize I could make a fortune in the runaway stock market. However, on the "nice to be able to pay the bills" side of things, when it all went south I was writing air traffic control software. Since our primary client was a government agency (the FAA), we weren't really affected by the whole dot com crash thing, so I remained gainfully employed throughout the worst of it. Every night when I say my prayers, I always put in a kind word for those folks. They treated me like family and kept me fed during a time when people were losing millions and programmers were working for Walmart. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. :-D
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Coming soon: Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua! www.PracticalUSA.com
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
I had a team of 15 developers as well as a vertical manufacturing add on to accouting systems. When the bubble burst, we lost everything and I am still trying to dig out of the mess. It has been extremely expensive and terribly painful but, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel is still a bit long but I do believe I can see the end.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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Simon Stevens wrote:
Dam...I've been using vmware for at least that long. Why didn't I think of that. It's always obvious afterwards.
I jumped on the IPO the first day, then sold it when it hit $95. Almost doubled my IRA. Marc
How do you find out about these things in advance. I never know about initial stock being sold until after it's happened.
Simon
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
I only do real programming, not that Web garbage. The employer I had in the late 90s was doing government work.
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How do you find out about these things in advance. I never know about initial stock being sold until after it's happened.
Simon
Simon Stevens wrote:
How do you find out about these things in advance. I never know about initial stock being sold until after it's happened.
Well, there's two parts to an IPO--the private sale and the public sale. Obviously I can't get in on the private sale, but the morning it went public I called my broker. The IPO has to be filed, often months in advance, and these things usually show up on MarketWatch[^], but if you want a detailed listing, there's here[^], for example. Google "IPO filings". Marc
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Simon Stevens wrote:
How do you find out about these things in advance. I never know about initial stock being sold until after it's happened.
Well, there's two parts to an IPO--the private sale and the public sale. Obviously I can't get in on the private sale, but the morning it went public I called my broker. The IPO has to be filed, often months in advance, and these things usually show up on MarketWatch[^], but if you want a detailed listing, there's here[^], for example. Google "IPO filings". Marc
Thanks. I'll have to watch them. I'll post about it when I lose stacks of money :)
Simon
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
I was screwed out of 2 months pay from my dotcom employer, then landed a programming job with a major non-tech company. I was selected from over a 1000 applicants. It safely carried me through the bust years.
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I only do real programming, not that Web garbage. The employer I had in the late 90s was doing government work.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I only do real programming, not that Web garbage. The employer I had in the late 90s was doing government work.
hehehe, yup, I went from oil to government, I only heard about the dotcom issues. :-D
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
Working for an "Internet Consultancy" firm. You can imagine what happened! I hid in an NPO for 3 years after that until the dust had cleared.
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me :doh:
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
Heh. My investments took a severe beating thanks to a few illogical buys. Lesson learned. Apart from that, the first[^] startup I joined tanked miserably; the second[^] is still around and doing very well, only because the management team has always been grounded in reality. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
Simon Stevens wrote:
Did anyone make/lose millions?
Well... not millions but 10's of thousands. ;) My 401K is with a major mutual fund house and I was able to ride the .COM bubble up and then bail into something "safe" a month or so before the burst. I did the same thing with real estate a couple years ago. I'm doing energy, natural resources and overseas funds at the moment.
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
Computer network service, didn't really notice the bubble burst personally except for one small mutual fund that was heavily tech oriented and which I purposefully put only $500.00 in because our mutual fund guy said it was "high growth but high risk". Pets.com is the only company I actually remember going out of business back then because it was the go to joke for late night chat show hosts.
"The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying." - David Ogilvy
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
What, there was a bust? Didn't even notice. If I thought real hard I might come up with something to whine about, but it would sound like Margaretaville...
MrPlankton
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I farted at least twice.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001So that's why we lost those foreign investors in 2001! Damn you and your SBD's! And we all thought they were kidding when they mentioned in passing that "something smelled fishy".
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
I worked at a large computer company of the time whose stock was tied to the whole tech bubble. I managed to get enough of it early on that it paid for my down payment on my house just in time for me to get into the housing bubble. :doh: Seriously, it helped me get into a neighborhood that I really dig. I have t-shirts from several dot coms that I worked with and now are completely out of business. The whole time I was saying to anyone that would listen, any company that wanted to charge $800,000 a year to host 7 jsp pages that they called a custom application wasn't going to be in business long. :-D
This blanket smells like ham
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
I was still into print design and production, and found myself out on my a#* with no contract work a week after a job ended. Had to go back to school, then again, because I'd learn one new set of skills, still not be able to find work, then be considered 'out of date' as work started to open. Guess I should be a perma student. . . :cool:
_________________________________________________ Have a great day!!! -- L.J.
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Something Jim said a few moments ago got me thinking. Was anyone here involved with IT projects in the late 90's during the boom? What happened when things collapsed? Did anyone make/lose millions? I was a bit too young to be involved. I was still writing space invader clones on my schools PC's, but I'd love to hear some stories.
Simon
At the time, I was doing bleeding-edge consulting; my business model all through the '80s and '90s was to try to have demonstrable capabilities 3-6 months before they ecame "hot". If I guessed right, I could position myself as mission-capable when everybody else was still waiting for the books to come out. Come about mid-2000, the kind of companies I worked with stopped being interested in locally-developed new tech; if they couldn't send it off to India or import a bunch of H1B dilettantes, they just weren't interested. It took me a good three years and basing myself in East and South-East Asia before things started turning around. Now what I do is at least as much business-process consulting as actual development. The funny thing is that, back in the day, my folks talked me out of a writing career and into software (being "close enough" to "real" engineering for their tastes)....and now, teh technical aspects of my writing are almost irrelevant.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: jeff_dickey
