This is how the first dot-com ended for me, including a few jobs prior, because I feel the setup is important.

I out of college I started a company with some friends from high-school, worked that for 6 months, but wasn't making any money, so I got a job at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. I worked there for over a year, but hated suburbia (back then Seattle didn't have many people who lived downtown, and pre-restaurant scene, etc, so I left for a good consulting job on the east coast and proceeded to spend the next 1.5 years traveling a lot, mostly to Chicago, but some NY. It was a fun lifestyle for a young hot-shot C++ guy. Then one of my co-workers quit to start a Startup and I was employee number 4 or so. Back then the stock market was starting to go wild. We competed against (and valued our company) like one called Vertical Net [1], we were exuberant and cocky. My friends were at companies like SilkNet, which got acquired Kana, all my social circle (25 to 26 year oldish) were involved with high-flying startups and we thought we were all going to be so rich. We even started playing the options market, one of our favorites was Nokia and Yahoo options trades. One of my co-workers made so much trading options in a week, that he cashed out and went and bought an Audi S4. We were all making fun of him (but the joke was on those of us who continued to play).

Anyway, after a year at that startup, I moved to another high-flying one across the river in Cambridge, MA. I only a contractor at this one, but the money was insane (it's actually taken me about 15 years to get back to the same money I was making there). Anyway, I think it was November 2000, we suddenly had some lay-offs announced. They didn't get rid of us right away, though, they kept the contractors o until the end of the year. But no biggie, I found another job immediately for a company called ATG. I was going to start at ATG [2] in February 2001 as a sales engineer. So, in the meantime, I took off for Europe for six weeks. And proceeded to have the time of my life, looking forward to my next job. At one point in Paris, I almost bought a Picasso "sketching" for like 10K US, but instead settled for a more modest $700 artist by a Japanese etcher that I liked way more. The next part of the trip, I blew out my ACL skiing in Chamonoix, and then headed back to the US to await starting my new job.

So, about two days before I was supposed to start the job, I got a call from ATG that they're having lay-offs and that I'm not to show up for work on the following Monday. Crap. No, biggie, I've always found tons of work. So, I put my feeler's out, and even contacted places that had made me offers in December 2000, but no go. Hiring freezes everywhere.

In June, I finally found some contract work at Staples.Com where I worked for about 6 months. 9/11 happened in September, and by December I was no longer at Staples.Com.

I couldn't find work for about 8 months after that. And then I ended up working for the State of MA in the Department of Revenue working on software for collecting child support in the Fall of 2002. I had gone from a high-flying C++ coder making $90/hour+ down to making $33/hour (working with Visual Basic and ASP). Then about two months into the DOR job, the recruiting company called and said they could only pay me $22/hour.

I didn't really get back on my feet fully until I started another job in January 2004 at another consulting company (now as a Java/C# engineer), and it was still for about half of what I made during the dot-com boom. And then from there I slowly crawled my career back.

In the meantime, most of my friends went back to school, because attorneys, eye-doctors (New England College of Optometry), one became a psychologist, the ones who stayed in tech moved into sales-side. There's only two of us who are still practicing engineers (and I'm 90% on the management side this days).

It was a long road back for me, but I always loved technology. Part of that road back was writing and publishing with Wiley a tech book, doing some more consulting, starting a couple businesses, failing a couple businesses, going through a nasty acquisition, and then finding a dream job again.

If you've read this far, I'll sum it with a couple of fun antidotes: remember that company I started with friends out of college? They sold a couple years later to Amazon for about $30M. Remember the guy who bought the Audi S4 with the options profits? The rest of us eventually pissed all our profits away in poor trades as the market was collapsing. He at least got an S4 out of it :). I still have some regrets about leaving Microsoft, I was working on an awesome team there, and financially (if I could have survived the moral of the Balmer days), I'd have been way better off (and I doubt I would be been cut during the grim times). But I've had a lot of good times with my travels and seen a lot more of the world because I left that job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VerticalNet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Technology_Group