The crusty old geek with 30 years of experience can’t get a word in as Adam, the 19 year old hot-shot system administrator, tells everyone how to do their jobs. “Your opinion really doesn’t matter, dude, you’re like old”, he says, as he adjusts his Linux World t-shirt. As BrokenToothpicks.Com stock soars to $300 a share and its 24 year old high school dropout CEO lashes out against the “old way of doing things”, Adam just might be right. People start to listen to these new brainiacs and Dot Com Rockstars who can do no wrong. Adam thinks he’s God. How can he not? He’s making money hand over fist and plans to retire to a private island just as soon as his options vest. Everyone else must just be an idiot—I mean, come on, how can they work for so long and STILL drive a used Subaru. Adam is the reason that houses are unaffordable, the stock market crashed, unemployment is high, and the bread you bought just the other day has already gone bad.

It takes all kinds

It takes all kinds of people for the world to run. Sometimes, people end up in the same place at the beginning of an evening but start out in completely different worlds. The types of people who ended up being important (or visible) within the Dot Com Boom were either the brilliant minds (wonder kids) with a crystal ball for a mind and ideas coming out of every pore—or the people who weren’t, but were told, nonetheless, that they were brilliant. See, in order to keep everyone happy, everyone was told that they were the best. There didn’t seem to be room for any junior level positions. During the dot com boom, the corporate ladder started at the top. Everyone was a Senior Vice President of their own cubicle.

There is so much that people don’t understand. One of the greatest lessons someone can learn is to know when their input doesn’t matter and someone else just might have better insight into a problem. In the real world, people at the highest level of knowledge in all areas were split organizationally. The techies ran the computer systems, the marketing department was in charge of spreading the word, the executives at the top knew how to keep the company afloat. Usually these areas of expertise were split and everyone understood their role. The system programmer wouldn’t tell the CEO how to run his organization.

All of that changed with the “success” of all these new startup companies. Starting a business became simple. A new “company” running out of an apartment all of a sudden had a market value rivalling 20 year old established companies. The 5 year business plan was now too slow. A CEO with a long term vision was told to speed things up. Senior Vice Presidents from these “successful” new companies were brought in to make things work. Their insight into the new ways to run a company was sought after.

Out went a solid business plan. Out went long term planning. Welcome to the Friday Beer Bash! Welcome to the video game room. Welcome to Nerf gun battles and quirky toys in the main lobby. Meet our new Vice President. Don’t mind the shorts and flipflops. He knows how the new world runs. The blinders went on and companies were magically headed, in all areas of the organization, by the new faces of success. There wasn’t room for anyone who didn’t jump on the bandwagon.

When a technology savvy kid is told that everything they touch turns to gold, what right does he have to think otherwise? When the technology savvy kid decides he’s accomplished all there is to accomplish in his field, who is going to tell him that his Midas touch can’t apply to other aspects of the company? So it begins. The dot com whiz kids invade the business world and show everyone that only their own ideas matter. And as stocks keep hitting new highs, everyone thinks they’re right.

The boom and the bust

Values in the old economy

Let’s step back a few years and try to remember the world when your parents graduated and they were ready to enter the job market. Educated (or not), your father walked into his first job at a big stable company. He came in at a junior position and eyed that corner office. “20 years and it just might be mine!”, he thinks. Work hard, show some loyalty, learn from the more experienced co-workers and everything will eventually work itself out. Time—there’s usually a reason that shortcuts aren’t the norm. Modesty—actually realizing that he still had a lot to learn. Patience—good things come to those who wait. Maybe he’ll retire some day and get a nice pension. A 1.4% cost of living increase after a year was appreciated and was cause for celebration. His goals were to provide for his family, himself, and eventually buy a humble home and a new economy car.

There was no such thing as getting rich quick, and money wasn’t wasted on frivolous luxuries. He worked hard for his money and saw no need to throw it away. He understood that you had to pay your dues to gain a full understanding of how things work.

These lessons were passed on to the next generation with a wink and hope that the next generation will work even harder and maybe have a little bit of extra breathing room.

Adam’s generation—focused on wealth, bling-bling, and instant gratification—laughed it all off. Adam knew better. He saw 30 years of work turn into pre-IPO stock options and the promise of a guaranteed retirement right away. Slaving away working for “the man” did not apply to his generation. Moore’s Law states that the speed of a processor doubles every 18 months. Internet Speed. Things moved faster in the new world. Expectations were high. Money grew on trees. Adam’s generation was happy to apply this law to their careers and all the pieces of their lives.

Unfortunately, the same “just do it” mentality had no room for planning, doing things the right way, or any sort of research. People sat down, put together a business plan, a web site, or some sort of bleeding edge architecture and weren’t around to pick up the pieces when things broke. See, they’d be retired in the Bahamas by the time their untested theories would be put to the test. And we let them do it.

I remember working at a company with many lofty goals and guaranteed success. The recruiter, during my interview, told me that everyone was already counting their money before a product had been developed. Venture capital was already there and any options we get would be worth millions. It was a sure thing. When I was interviewed, one clear business plan existed. When I signed the paperwork, the original plan had been scrapped and the company was going in a new direction. When I walked in the door on my first day, the plan had changed again. When I made this observation I was met with shrugs. “The market is dynamic. We’re adapting to it. We need to be on the ball to get the most funding. As soon as we find out what the venture capitalists want, we’ll stick with it”, said the head of the marketing department. He ended up leaving after a few months (and a few new business plans). It had been exactly one year since he had signed on. Part of his ungodly amount of options had vested. It was time to move on to the next place. His plan? No one really knew. See, according to the plan, the first few months was research. The deliverables were all due after 13 months. He left after 12. When the next marketing executive came in to pick up where he left off, he found nothing. The cycle started over again. Everyone seemed to be too scared to question anything anyone was doing or they were left with an angry employee crying about being misunderstood. Think of professional sports. No loyalty, just whining.

I’m under the impression that everyone during the wonderful economic boom we experienced, only knew how to talk and not how actually deliver anything useful. Their justification must have been that if the company itself didn’t do anything, neither did they.

Demand and lowered expectations

As people started to see the potential of the Internet and the New Economy, every kid who knew Linux (you’re senior, an expert, a master after installing it just once, right?) was sought after to help get new money making web sites on the network. All you needed to start a new company was a domain name, a network connection and a stupid idea. Former insurance salesmen (and now current Dot Com CEOs) wanted to quickly hire the Linux kids to set up their new companies for them. As these retired restaurant managers came up with even more ideas (“What if we set up a company that sells mismatched Tupperware online?!”), these former cab drivers (and Dot Com Visionaries) had a smaller and smaller pool of people to pick from. “Ok, so what if he can spell Linux. He might do”, goes through the thrifty minds of the former gun shop owner-turned Internet Entrepreneur.

The goal of all these utterly unqualified web company owners was to set up their web site and think of the ways they would spend their billions and billions of dollars. “Sure kid, you can be a senior engineer. Just get the box up and running.”