Camel from Kyzylkum

Dot-Com Bubble

THE DOT-COM BUBBLE WAS a stock market bubble caused by excessive speculation in Internet-related companies. In the late 1990s, the euphoria of online commerce and services began. Many Internet companies (known as “dot-coms”) were launched. Assumptions were made that online companies were going to be worth millions. At the end of the 1990s, the economy was booming, and IT people were in huge demand, almost to the point that if one knew the basics about computers, he or she could be hired to be a programmer or database administrator, or for any other IT position.

At the end of 1997, a small company from New York City, operated by young Russian immigrants, arrived in Buffalo, New York. They promised to teach people how to write computer code in two months and be a reference for them when they looked for jobs. The company charged $4,000 for these services. The news spread quickly among the members of our Russian immigrant community in Buffalo. I concluded I was going to give it a chance. My girlfriend Tanya, and my cousin Rimma’s husband, Yury, attended this course, too. For me, the subject was absolutely foreign—I had just recently become a computer user, but I knew nothing about computer code, networking, computer languages, and so on. I tried very hard to learn, as I thought it might be an opportunity for me to get a job in Information Technology.

Two months passed quickly, and I got familiar with some basic computer terminology and concepts, but, of course, I still did not have a deep knowledge of the subject. Nevertheless, I started to hunt for a position as a computer programmer in Buffalo. All of the Russian people who attended this course with me did the same. Buffalo is not a very big city, and even at the time of the dot-com bubble, job openings were scarce. Our resumes, prepared by the Russian company that gave us the course, were identical; only the names were different. According to these resumes, we all worked for the Russian company in New York City as programmers or database administrators, which, of course, was not true. Add to that how all of us were applying for the same open positions with the same companies in Buffalo. I remember that during one of my interviews, the person who was interviewing me asked me all kinds of questions—he was suspicious why suddenly so many Russian immigrants had applied for this job and all of them had the same credentials and had previously worked for the same company. His suspicions made me worried, and I realized I might need to move out of Buffalo in order to find a computer job and avoid being discovered as being involved in something not really legal.