As far as the work environment, it is exactly what you read about. A few guys in a basement or a garage. A desktop sitting next to you as the server. Slinging code and trying to get it to customers. At my first startup, we didn't even have an internet connection - we developed on a local LAN, and transferred the deliverable to the clients via FTP from home, or sometimes even via disk. We got a few customer and rented an office space, and then had 6 guys in 3000 square feet of open space with a few folding tables. Later, we were able to build out walls, hire more people, and make it a real office.
We went public, had lots of paper numbers next to our names, and then it all crashed.
You're right about that. The lean startup, "there's no truth in the office", Minimum Viable Product concepts just weren't a thing back then, they would have saved one of the companies I worked for if the founders had known and accepted them. Instead they spent way too much time in stealth mode, hired a corporate lawyer to get them a bogus patent, were way too worried about competitors instead of ever getting traction for their idea, spent too much time debating details of the website, and who would pay what for precisely what sort of service, and too much upfront engineering to handle a huge demand which didn't materialize due to sabotage by the last round of investors who were found in desperation half a year before launch.
Seeing that most startups are failing and the only YC company that has ever gone public - Dropbox - is still not profitable, I am not sure that we have “figured it out”, if you define “successful” as a company that makes a product that can sustain a company profitable.
How many successful exits have been through acquisitions by larger companies where the original product was killed either outright or through neglect.
I was so desperate I applied to a company that was just a one man shop, and I'd be maintaining Access databases. And got rejected for a better candidate! I also had a job interview where "we get always the girls in for an interview to see what they look like" ... I'm a guy, but was pretty horrified. Did I instantly reject the company? No... I needed to eat. This was also at a time when "personality" questions and questionairres were all the rage, I suck at them, and man it was so good to be offered a job by a reasonable company that liked me for my ability to like ... write code.
I was like hold on they talked to me, gave me a coding test and made me an offer. Wow that was easy! Like now I'm thinking that should be standard. Any company who gets me in for 2 full days (after a first interview), unless they are sending me to the moon, can f'off.
I think for a lot of people that experience was a wake up call to the reality of the world. One year everybody with a technical degree is graduating with jobs waiting, the next year there are no jobs and even the most specialized (e.g. Microelectronic engineering degrees) people are having offers revoked. Family and parents don't understand because supposedly if you have a degree in IT or CS jobs are just waiting for you and plentiful. New graduates are wondering what's wrong with them that they can't even get the most basic job.
Plus, at that time you had to deal with Monster.com, which was one of the most horrible and SPAM filled BS job sites on earth. Post your resume and get an "exiting offer to be an entrepreneur" and it turns out you can be an agent for an insurance company in your local area. That made job-seekers even more depressed.
That being said, a lot of stuff that is trivial today was a complete mess. Ever spent days debugging why all the new computers are crashing and it turned out to be the driver for your network card conflicting with another card the IT department installed? Jobs in software and IT could be a total mess because of all the different things technical people were doing.
I worked for a small company with a CEO who had done well for themselves running a small non-tech company and they decided to invest their money in a .com/internet venture. It was almost a textbook example of a CEO who thought there was money just waiting on the internet and all you had to was build something. No strategy around how to make money, users, or much of anything. The company was circling the drain even before the product was released and I was too young and stupid to quit the day the paychecks started bouncing. I don't think that's very different than many startups today.
Another friend worked for a bigger hardware company that was living on all the .com money floating around. He loved it. When everything went bust that company went bust as well. Another friend was a CEO of a company that was "Surviving on signed contracts where we signed a contract with another company and they signed a contract with us." You can imagine what happened when the bust occurred - all that paper money vanished.
I actually think software jobs are a lot better now. There's a lot more definitions and better discipline about what a developer does. The tooling is certainly better. I think there's also more respect and awareness about software development from others. Plus, I can move my big monitor now and not end up with a back injury :)
The way I got the job was by founding a startup in the same industry that was bought by said company.
We mostly believed the hype. However, for that particular company and industry it wasn’t all hype but founded on reasonable assumptions. The company had its problems and has been transformed several times over the years but it still exists to this day!
Working as a developer back then was different because that role wasn’t the more or less well-defined job it is today (or in larger, established companies for that matter).
As a developer you often were responsible for all things technical, from the office network to installing new servers hardware to actual software development. Basically, it was DevOps before there was DevOps - albeit in a much less well-structured manner.
Interestingly, back in the day designers and developers rarely worked together in the same team. It was more of a “We throw web design artefacts over the wall and see what happens.” set-up.
The hype? Largely justified, even if the timing was off, there's no denying this has become a very big thing, note Amazon was founded in 1994. For me getting a job was no different than getting one prior to the Internet really taking off in this first wave.
BjoernKW's comments about the job being not tightly defined, and being responsible for many things including raw hardware matches my experience. And "cloud" alternatives to your own hardware, even if installed at a colo, weren't an option, weren't even for the start of 2nd batch of companies following the crash. And like his experience, one of the companies I worked for in the late 1990s lasted through it and way beyond, was independent until a few years ago when they were bought and folded into another company.
One very big difference is that the IPO exit option largely ended for most companies, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 seems to have been the tipping point.
