Comment by DanielHB

It didn’t last past 2001 (lasted from 1996ish to 2001) and much of the money was stock and not real money so the paper millionaires never had the money since it never vested by the time they were hired until the time the dot com company went bust. VA Linux was a prime example of a company that didn’t have a profitable exit and evaporated with the market correction that I remember started in late 2000. The 9/11 attacks in NYC erased any chance of a dot com recovery.

Everyone knew there was this thing called the internet because cable broadband was being deployed everywhere and being sold for less than cost. That company whose name I couldn’t remember went bust I think around 2003(?) and I think AT&T took them over and doubled the price.

I remember someone showing me that you could do to domino’s pizza website and get a free pizza (unlimited orders) just for going to their website. I think that was 2002-3(?). There were lost of giveaways during that era. It all came to a stop as the internet grew and costs pilled up more so than the dot com bust.

No, it is not the same at all.

I worked at a small investment firm in college during the time and I remember the portfolio manager doing the portfolio allocation for a retirement plan. Randomly picking Janus mutual funds in the hall right before he went to lunch.

I remember the secretary complaining in December 1999 how she knew a secretary at another firm that got rich from an IPO.

There has just never been a level a speculation like in late 1999 that I have ever experienced. This was over geocities level webpages on dial up modems with almost no business plans to even make money.

I was working in Atlanta GA for boring old profitable enterprise companies and the environment didn’t change at all.

I started working in 1996. By 2001, I was making $70K. The company I worked for did bill printing for utility companies. To put that in perspective, I had my first house built in the suburbs for $175k. This was well within the rule of thumb of not spending more than 3.5x income for a house.

On the other hand, I didn’t have that much invested in the stock market. The entire dot com bust was a shrug and curiousity to me while it was happening.

On the other hand, the real estate crash in 2008…

While all of my latest projects (cloud consulting) have in some form another involved “AI”, they are really just AWS API calls that are much easier using Gen AI LLMs. But could have been done with much more development and training of ML models before.

When the AI bust happens, it will have the same affect on me - none. Until businesses stop needing people who know how to translate the latest tech into business value, my career is safe.

It was largely the same. A ton of Internet companies struggled to find a way to make money after the initial land grab, and most failed. The hype was breathless and over the top.

A lot of late 90s to early 2000s hype has come true. Today we have substantial companies with no physical office and that have never used physical mail, delivery for everything, and ubiquitous connectivity for devices. It just took about 15-20 more years to get there.

I suspect we will have AI replacing programmers on non-trivial and non-slop projects in 15-20 years.

The social optimism of the late 90s and 2000s about the Internet was mostly wrong though. We didn’t really anticipate either surveillance capitalism or mass disinformation breaking whole segments of the population off from reality. Like most well intentioned people we had trouble even imagining the uses that “dark triad” personality types would have for the technology.

The pessimism around AI is, I think, an overcorrection from the excessive optimism around the net and the web.