I went through the dot-com-crash. This might not be wonderful advice but how I made it through was to hold on to my job despite taking on loads of new roles and work without expecting more pay. I kept from being a salary target. I did this at one of the worst companies in the history of the internet but I do not regret it. I stuck with it and just accepted all the new roles and responsibilities as learning experience. With feet to the fire I picked up decades of experience in less than a decade. I eventually left when the fifth merger/chapter-11 resulted in customers and employees being put into precarious legal situations. I will not name the company as some of those shady individuals are still running companies.<p>It was both the worst and best experience I could have had. I learned a great deal but had to accept being put into morbid situations of documenting the jobs of people that left and people that were about to leave. Knowing some of those people had kids to feed made it very rough and demoralizing. But I stuck with it, mostly kept my head down and just took on every challenge I could to gain as much knowledge and experience as possible. I automated countless tasks before automation was cool.<p>These experiences and knowledge I gained benefited me greatly in my career at other companies.
I left physics in 1999 to go into software development. I remember watching football at my in-laws, seeing the ads for cars and beer were replaced with ads for stocks and bonds, figured that was a sure sign of a top. (See <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39358391-the-money-game" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39358391-the-money-game</a> for the bubble case story that informed me.) I went home and sold half my stocks. I sold the other half in April.<p>I spent 2000 moving in, I spent a lot of time on political activism around this time, made some money writing chapters for computer books, writing books caused me to get consulting work, by 2002 I had an in-person job.<p>I would say though that the 2000 crash might be a different story from today because in retrospect we know the internet had a ways to grow and it was not dominated by monopolists. In 2020 it's less clear where the growth comes from, monopolies are holding back progress (No room for a second good mobile OS when Google is bankrolling the Zombie OS Android.) It would be interesting to make a comparison with the stock market bubble of the 1990 with the cryptocurrency racket now.
I am currently looking for work and I can see some struggle, just because of the Ukraine/Russian war and the post COVID pandemic impacted seriously the remote work market. Advice on how to keep afloat is welcome.