My first job out of university was with a graphics hardware start-up in Bristol in late 1998. I lasted there for about six months, but it didn't work out largely because they tried to hire someone junior to do a senior guy's job.
So in a sense I started my working life as a beneficiary of the Dot.com bubble...
I then went to work for a graphics application company just outside of London. There wasn't much opportunity for progression there, I wasn't earning enough to buy into the local property market, and I was having real difficulties with a housemate.
I should point out that the company owned a couple of local houses that it rented to its staff. Being in Hertfordshire, they were based in prime commuter territory, and the sort of junior staff they recruited couldn't easily afford rents. I was in one of these properties, and so couldn't afford to move out.
So I decided to hand in my notice, and move to a more lucrative contract role. I was asked to stay on for a few weeks to finish off the project, this was in August / September 2000, but I ended up being there until Christmas. In that time the jobs market went from buoyant to dead as the Dot.com bubble blew out.
For the next two or three years there simply wasn't a demand for IT staff. I spent most of that period working as a games tested for a company in Brighton (trust me, it's not as much fun as it sounds), before trying to start something up on my own. The latter went horribly wrong in the spend a good part of a year working for nothing, only for the client to get all the benefit sort of a way...
In 2004, after several years living well below the poverty line, I landed a contract development role. I think that a lot of IT professionals who got caught between jobs had a similar experience, as it was a sector specific recession, at least in the UK.
The thing is that the bubble never seemed to go away as far as Silicon Valley thinks. Look at the valuations that Google or Facebook have assigned to their acquisitions. Are companies like Instagram, Nest, Deep Mind, Snapchat, Uber and so forth really worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars?