It was 1999, and the geeks were going to change the world.
Honestly. We lived in this microcosm of completely insane expectations where the Aeron chairs proved that money was flowing to us, and therefore to the whole world, and all we had to do was give stuff away and that would somehow translate to a Whole New Economy(tm).

It was like 1967, the summer of love. We thought that Free Software would change everyone's view of the world, and we'd all learn to love each other for our unique strengths and differences, and send us lots o' money for computer upgrades.

We also thought that by Giving Stuff Away(tm) we'd build this set of credentials that would make people want to Send Us Money Anyway(tm), after we'd set the precedent of giving stuff away.

We also equated large collections of vendor logo adorned tshirts obtained at self congratulatory "Computer Conference and Trade Shows" to be "On the Cutting Edge" of technology. Cutting edge, yes, but more on the edge of cutting cloth with body odor alone. Some of these antisocial misfits who occupied the geek fringe didn't have standard hygeine skills.

An impressive lack of understanding of standard business principles and human psychology, to be sure, but honestly, are the geeks to blame? What about Adult Supervision(tm)? Did the geeks do this alone? Were they stuck in gorgeous San Francisco offices with their nerf weapons and their $1500 Aeron chairs with a hearty "Let us know when you finish something!"?

Actually, Yes, they were. Pretty much. Something about "Geek Friendly Environments". Something about "Great Software, like Great Art, cannot be hurried". Man, the shit we pulled under the guise of that Last Great Excuse of the Lazy.

This might be telling tales out of school, but I worked for a firm who hired the _President's_ coke dealer to run their NOC. Seriously.

Who was the adult supervision there? A Certified General Accountant. VP title, no real power, or experience at anything other than building houses. Not software. My job there was essentially to keep the cokeheads out of the dev department. I quit, finally, because of the coke dealer. He had a way of being totally a piss off to me. Probably because he wanted my job too.

Geeks are not tradesmen. With tradesmen, the work quality shows pretty quickly. 1 month and crappy carpentry shows up. Not so with geeks. Poorly written, undocumented crap appears on the surface to operate exactly the same as great code. During the demo, at least. And thats all that management ever noticed.

Trademen are also subcontractors. You can just refuse to pay. Thats a pretty heavy incentive for quality.

Now, before we go blaming the geeks for shitty quality, lets have a nice round of ranting for the abuse of the geeks. When the money ran out. And the pay was in the form of stock. In worthless companies. You'd get more value wiping your ass with those stock certificates than it was worth on the open market. Granted, about 0.00001% of those geeks did get a pay off. Akamai, Amazon, Netscape, Ebay. You can count them on two hands at most.

Now let us address the evils of venture capitalism. On the surface, vencap is a pretty risky but rewarding business. So, the idea is you throw 5 million USD at some new idea, with the risk of losing it all, for the potential upside of owning a half of something that sells for 100 million in two years. Lets see, 10 times your value. Sounds like a nice upside. So the risks were downplayed and this HUGE amount of money got thrown at Silicon Valley. From groups of Dentists who were told this was a huge opportunity. And who brought absolutely no management experience to the table

Now, Silly Valley is a finite size, with a finite number of people. So that means that every time a new project got funded, it used up some of the talent pool, and often burnt out some of the talent as well. So by 1999, the really good guys were few and far between. And they were tired, and often not thinking straight. Kind of hard to produce good quality if you have to ask what day it is before asking the time.

And then we have the Hype Machine. Also known as the Evil Trinity of Stock Market, The Media Outlets and the Marketing People. Let us not forget them. Let us not forget the ever faster rhythm of IPO, Beta Test, Product Review, and Splashy Marketing Ploy. Let us remember, oh so clearly, the graffiti campaign. Let us clearly, and with malice aforethought remember the buzzword campaigns of e-commerce and e-business, and e-marketing and e-foo and e-bar.

So the recipe for an overwrought economy is pretty simple: You need a lot of well meaning but misguided (or unguided) geeks developing software for inexperienced (or inexplicable) management (mis)guided by fast talking marketing people with not even and inkling of standard due diligence from a bunch of opportunist investors with money, but no business savvy to bring to the table.

Not that I noticed this or anything.