I graduated in 1999 and probably should have stayed for grad school. I had good enough grades my Alma Mater was basically sending me letters my senior year "Hey you're just about guaranteed to get in if you apply!" It's hard to say as if I'd just gotten a master's I would have been getting out in the middle of the crash (bad) but if I'd stayed through getting a Phd I would have had a very different traectory.
But the whole .com boom was way too exciting. I knew lots of people who dropped out. I started out working at Cisco but then left to go to a networking startup and got there just in time for stuff to start blowing up. When I left Cisco the assigned Financial Advisor I had a Morgan Stanley recommended I take a loan for something like $200k to take my options with me or something. I was like 24 and had almost no savings, there was no way I was going to do that. Cisco ended up tanking from 200+ down to the 10-20 range months after I left IIRC. I remember telling a co-worker who got laid off at the same time that I felt stupid as I had spent a lot of my earnings paying off my car I had bought brand new and I also had a motorcycle. He remarked he had kept driving his 20 year old Honda Accord but had no more money than me because he'd lost everything in the stock market crash.
As others have said 9/11 was some kind of weird marker for a lot of us that it was all over. The company I worked for made it about another year after that but I have vivid memories of everyone doom watching the news in the kitchen at work before the CEO came and told us to go home for the day on 9/11. I went home and went out and rode my bicycle all afternoon where I had no way to get any news, it made me feel better.
When I got laid off it was like every single one of my friends was laid off too. All of us at once, and it wasn't layoffs, it was companies completely going under.
There was a lot of malfeasance too. I knew people who had jobs where there was almost zero work as the company was a borderline scam. People were either playing video games at their desk all day waiting for management to figure out what they were going to work on or they were studying for their next job.
I was super lucky. Both my roommate and I got laid off at the same time, we ended up breaking our lease and going separate ways. I lived with my parents for a while, but I only actually was laid off about 6 weeks before finding a contract job. Neither my finances nor my career really took much of a hit, but my confidence took a major hit that realistically took 5-6 years to really come out of.
But the whole .com boom was way too exciting. I knew lots of people who dropped out. I started out working at Cisco but then left to go to a networking startup and got there just in time for stuff to start blowing up. When I left Cisco the assigned Financial Advisor I had a Morgan Stanley recommended I take a loan for something like $200k to take my options with me or something. I was like 24 and had almost no savings, there was no way I was going to do that. Cisco ended up tanking from 200+ down to the 10-20 range months after I left IIRC. I remember telling a co-worker who got laid off at the same time that I felt stupid as I had spent a lot of my earnings paying off my car I had bought brand new and I also had a motorcycle. He remarked he had kept driving his 20 year old Honda Accord but had no more money than me because he'd lost everything in the stock market crash.
As others have said 9/11 was some kind of weird marker for a lot of us that it was all over. The company I worked for made it about another year after that but I have vivid memories of everyone doom watching the news in the kitchen at work before the CEO came and told us to go home for the day on 9/11. I went home and went out and rode my bicycle all afternoon where I had no way to get any news, it made me feel better.
When I got laid off it was like every single one of my friends was laid off too. All of us at once, and it wasn't layoffs, it was companies completely going under.
There was a lot of malfeasance too. I knew people who had jobs where there was almost zero work as the company was a borderline scam. People were either playing video games at their desk all day waiting for management to figure out what they were going to work on or they were studying for their next job.
I was super lucky. Both my roommate and I got laid off at the same time, we ended up breaking our lease and going separate ways. I lived with my parents for a while, but I only actually was laid off about 6 weeks before finding a contract job. Neither my finances nor my career really took much of a hit, but my confidence took a major hit that realistically took 5-6 years to really come out of.