Dot-Com Craze Peaked 10 Years Ago This Week 192
netbuzz writes "When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000, it had more than doubled in a year and the dot-com bubble was already leaking in a big way. A week later the NASDAQ had fallen 9 percent. A year later it was below 2000. Gone were such poster children of the era as Pets.com, Kozmo, and — who could forget? — Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz. Here's a look back."
Re:Being naive, I lost a lot of money that year (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends: Did you do the same thing in mortgage banking a couple of years ago?
And you've learned some important lessons about investing, like:
1. Don't trust hype.
2. No, really, don't trust hype.
3. If you invest on momentum, you've probably already missed the boat.
4. Profitable companies are better investments than unprofitable companies for a reason.
5. Don't be afraid to be conservative. You might not make as much as the folks who risk a lot, but you're much more likely to hang onto your cash.
Re:Kozmo.com (Score:4, Insightful)
And large banks.
And airlines.
And auto manufacturers.
And newspapers.
And publishers.
And Malls/retail.
God, I just got myself depressed again.
When you don't make anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you don't have a manufacturing sector, it's hard to create actual wealth. When corporate structures have co-opted your government into forcing you to compete with third world wages and shifted the tax burden from the richest to the middle class, it's impossible.
Hey, welcome to 18th Century France! I can't wait to see what happens next...
Re:Being naive, I lost a lot of money that year (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Programmers where like Rock Stars... (Score:3, Insightful)
You want a nice job out of college? Have experience. Do internships. Experience, experience and internships. Also, experience. And internships seldom hurt.
I did 3 internships over 4 summers and worked on an academic website during the school year. There was some big-name experience there: IBM offers a few good internship programs. I won't tell you how much I'm making now; you'd be aghast.
Re:Programmers where like Rock Stars... (Score:1, Insightful)
That is what really hurts most of us who lived the dot-com bust.
We all grew up being told how we would be rich before we were 30 and never unemployed, --just because it was the computer industry. We heard tale of many people living that dream, working in a field they intrinsically loved and being amply rewarded for loving it. If anything happened to your job, another one that paid better was waiting at the company across the street.
After the bust, many of us could not find work, or had to work McJobs --something we always had thought would never happen. If we found a "real" job it was at a lower rate of pay and had a dress code --goodbye tie-dye shirts, ripped jeans, and pink hair (which had been acceptable even at job interviews before). Then came the news reports of, not blue-collar industrial jobs, but the career we had studied hard for in college being outsourced to cheap labor overseas. Most of us that weren't knocked out of the industry have had to keep our heads out of the clouds, living in a world where even the once-mighty Microsoft can have mass layoffs. What was once the career that would make us special, has become just another field of work.
Don't criticize those of us who have a hard time getting over the recession of 2001. Many of us lost money. All of us lost our innocence.
The real world is sink or swim, and 2001 did not sink us all. But it's never been fun to swim when so many people said we would fly.
Re:the dotcom boom (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately that's rather the truth than "separating wheat from chaff". Back then I was as pissed as anyone when I got fired while a coworker whose only abilities concisted of blameshifting and buttkissing got promoted instead.
I just couldn't see the big picture back then, I basically live off these guys now! Here's how it works: Someone who could barely turn on a computer without causing a complete IT meltdown on the floor became sysadmin in 1999 because back then, basically anyone who could spell TCP/IP without tying a knot in his tongue was instantly seen as a network guru. Simply because everyone who could was already taken and anyone who could not could easily slip past a boss who knew even less about computers.
Time went on and the layoffs were usually amongst those that care less about buttkissing and job security than doing their job. Ya know, the guys that don't have to care about job security because they're good enough to get a new one should the old one suck enough that you tell your boss to stick it. So what's left was rather the chaff than the wheat. Time went on and they learned a thing or two. Unfortunately about three or four things changed in the meantime, so learning one or two just ain't enough. So they are facing a problem they cannot solve.
What does a clueless admin (I use that term loosely) with job security on his mind do in such a case? Tell his boss that he knows jack about computers? Of course not. He claims it is an issue that requires an expert for this particular field, and that nobody who must be a generalist to cover all bases (i.e. like him) can have this specialized knowledge. So you have to haul in an expert for this particular field of that "computer magic".
And that's where I come in. Now, I'm of course able to do a wee bit more than installing a firewall of your choice and configuring it so it doesn't block you from seeing your por... I mean, your valuable stock info, but you'd be surprised how often I'm called to do just that, or similar "you're kidding me, right?" tasks. At rates that would make me ask where the other guys are that I should sensibly get for that amount of greens per hour.
But they pay. And why do they pay? Simple: Boss believes his buttkisser. Buttkisser knows that he's overspending by some margin, but he can't back out now or he'd have to explain why such a "complicated" task does not warrant an expensive specialist (and you have to be some divine genius or boss would expect his 10-years-experience admin to be able to do it). And everyone else knows that they should better shut up anyway, because Buttkisser is usually also playing the work-bullying game and badmouths anyone who dares to question his ability as an admin (too many people noticing that he's actually a complete buffoon and the boss might catch on, so he has to be an asshole).
So you see why consultants are being so popular these days. I can't vouch for other areas of "expertise" where consultants get insane amounts of money to tell the obvious, but I guess it must be the same. In IT, you can get by with halfway decent knowledge and charge ... well, whatever your please. They pay.