I graduated with an associate's degree in Chicago in 1999 and went looking for a job right away. My skillset was mostly C/C++, but I was struggling to get responses to any of the resumes I faxed out. The crash was still over the horizon, but I think my lack of experience and lowly AS degree kept a lot of doors closed. The Midwest wasn't like the Valley in that respect.
I finally took a job with a company whose flagship product was a browser front end over a 30 year old Pick database. They hired almost anyone off the street and gave them a two week training course before turning them loose in client code (customizations to the flagship application). They were literally training new hires to program, and I was kind of at a disadvantage because I knew what I was doing and got things done quickly, which is a liability when you bill by the hour.
The twenty year old company re-branded to a dot com and was planning an IPO. We got new business cards and letterhead with the new name and everything. Then the owners saw the writing on the wall. They silently dropped their IPO plans and we got new business cards with the same new name except no ".com" at the end.
With only an associate's degree and with my only professional experience being an outdated database system + programming language, all recruiters wanted to talk to me about was roles with this same outdated system that was apparently running in places all over the world. If I wanted to hitch my wagon to a dying platform, I had a place in France begging for someone like me to one work on site for a couple months.
Even those calls stopped when the bubble burst. I took another job on that outdated platform that paid better and kept sending out resumes. Things eventually got better, but I still couldn't find a role outside Pick systems.
It wasn't until I spent my own cash on a Java certification AND the market improved that I started getting calls again. But then I faced a different challenge, because my Java experience was the wrong KIND. I had worked with Oracle Application Server and their suite, not Websphere or Weblogic. I understand now that a lot of that strict filtering was to prove that nobody local had the skills that offshore developers had. Yep, the early 2000s was all about offshoring!
It's my opinion that starting my career in that time and place set my career back at least five years. That experience is irrelevant now, thankfully, and I'm in a pretty good spot these days managing a devops team.
I don't want to be all "you kids don't know how easy you have it", but it's so easy today to spin up a web application, host it for practically free, and maybe make a business out of it. I would have to fax over code samples, and now you have recruiters and hiring managers cruising GitHub profiles looking for coders to reach out to.
I do worry about the possibility of another bubble. I'd probably be fine, even if I had to do something outside tech for a while. But for young folks outside SV things could get pretty hairy again.
I finally took a job with a company whose flagship product was a browser front end over a 30 year old Pick database. They hired almost anyone off the street and gave them a two week training course before turning them loose in client code (customizations to the flagship application). They were literally training new hires to program, and I was kind of at a disadvantage because I knew what I was doing and got things done quickly, which is a liability when you bill by the hour.
The twenty year old company re-branded to a dot com and was planning an IPO. We got new business cards and letterhead with the new name and everything. Then the owners saw the writing on the wall. They silently dropped their IPO plans and we got new business cards with the same new name except no ".com" at the end.
With only an associate's degree and with my only professional experience being an outdated database system + programming language, all recruiters wanted to talk to me about was roles with this same outdated system that was apparently running in places all over the world. If I wanted to hitch my wagon to a dying platform, I had a place in France begging for someone like me to one work on site for a couple months.
Even those calls stopped when the bubble burst. I took another job on that outdated platform that paid better and kept sending out resumes. Things eventually got better, but I still couldn't find a role outside Pick systems.
It wasn't until I spent my own cash on a Java certification AND the market improved that I started getting calls again. But then I faced a different challenge, because my Java experience was the wrong KIND. I had worked with Oracle Application Server and their suite, not Websphere or Weblogic. I understand now that a lot of that strict filtering was to prove that nobody local had the skills that offshore developers had. Yep, the early 2000s was all about offshoring!
It's my opinion that starting my career in that time and place set my career back at least five years. That experience is irrelevant now, thankfully, and I'm in a pretty good spot these days managing a devops team.
I don't want to be all "you kids don't know how easy you have it", but it's so easy today to spin up a web application, host it for practically free, and maybe make a business out of it. I would have to fax over code samples, and now you have recruiters and hiring managers cruising GitHub profiles looking for coders to reach out to.
I do worry about the possibility of another bubble. I'd probably be fine, even if I had to do something outside tech for a while. But for young folks outside SV things could get pretty hairy again.