after the asteroid

In Spring 2002, I went to every online job board at the time and saw virtually infinite opportunity. Top positions, unlimited salaries, vivid descriptions of massive company growth and career development opportunities. My inbox was crammed full of emails from recruiters. 

The problem was, it was like a post-apocalyptic film where all the people were gone, and the automation ran on without purpose. Business downsized or shuttered so quickly that nobody bothered to pull the JDs from Monster and hotjobs. There were no digital jobs in Boston in 2002 that paid more than $34 an hour, a few hours a week. Y2K was done, and all the big clients tightened their belts in the tech crash.

Startups paid young developers with intern-level salaries, and offered slim perks like a laptop with a Lucent WiFi card. There was a little money to be made, if you lived in your parents' basement.

Open source became acceptable, because it was free, period.

It turned out that most digital media clients didn’t want animation, 3D graphics, or sound effects. What they wanted was more reach at a lower cost in much less time.

New things sprung from that wasteland, of course. Scrappy, eager-to-please wee folk who seemed to have no memory of what had been accomplished in the before-times.

I had to un-learn all the crazy things I had done with Java and JavaScript and HTML, and just follow the patterns people wanted. This was not an industry of discovery and expressiveness, it was literally the dreaded "paste-up" work my generation had tried so hard to avoid after art school. In 2003 some of my old, nearly-obsolete skills became necessary: Funds for work proposed 18 months ago slowly trickled in and I got steady work, too late to keep my one-bed apartment in Harvard Square. But without the optimism and creative swagger of 1999, the work, and the people clinging to it, had become as plain and tired as the web production shops. It was all the jealous dullness, decorated with cheesy special effects.

It wasn't until 2004 I saw the beginning of a new age in my own career, and in my own life. It didn't come in form of agile web production. I was scooped up and saved by a dinosaur tech industry. Of course the dinosaur went extinct. But I got the chance to remember who I was, and what I am good at, and what really matters to me.

What will the next extinction event look like in digital media?