Back during the dotcom bust, which lasted from 2000 to 2002, many websites were hosted by racks of expensive, overpriced Sun servers when compared to useful commodity hardware like Intel Pentiums running apache. 4chan didn't really come around to 2003, so it was after the last of the dotcom bust ended.
Look at it this way: let's say the job market has 1000 jobs and they're all filled. 50 out of those 1000 are highly-skilled workers and the remaining 950 are useless (an optimistic estimate, believe me). Once all the zombie corps are dead, the market is left with 20 jobs out of the original 1000. So now the useless workers are just straight-up out of a job, and the 50 highly-skilled workers are now at each others throats for those remaining 20 jobs.
The really fun part is that those useless "administration and PR" roles tend to be 99% women, troons, and illiterate fat black women.
You're talking a technical recession. Ad revenue on the internet was very weak for nearly a decade or more, if we want to talk centralization of the internet into the current mega-sites; the vast reduction of internet ad revenue being responsible for all of the mom-and-pop style websites dying off would be a good starting point. 4chan launched after the technical recession ended for the dot-com bubble but the ramifications endured until nearly 2011 when there seemed to be a new spurt of growth on the internet, that ad revenue lasted until 2018, whenever PewdiePie had his bridge encounter, suddenly companies realized that most internet sites weren't paragons of purity and the revenue dried up again.
The more realistic view of the tech job market is that there’s 1000 jobs that are filled, with 50 of them those magic unicorn
workers and 950 are useless.
On the plus side, H1Bs, Indian and Chinese tech workers are the first out the fucking door. Having a team dedicated to fixing the fuckups that the streetshitter and chinaman outsourcers make is no longer going to make economic sense. (There will be a short period where they try to maximize this relationship before it collapses, however.)
I actually disagree, and this is a point that I neglected to make previously.
I don’t think you understand just how terrible Chinese Tech is.
Or Indian tech workers.
Absolutely correct. Even the apparently competent ones are fucking retarded in my experience. (No Professor Chong, you can't just mash a couple of neural networks together to shit out yet another machine learning paper and expect people to think you're a good researcher. And no Kumar, I don't trust that you set up our backend server correctly, and I don't care how many StackOverflow posts you pilfered to frankenstein together a Dockerfile that you think works when you still can't even explain in your own words what a container even is.)
I'm already seeing this happening, with a large essential company pushing for remote work. Problem is, the American hires don't show up to work and don't do their job. The newest hires-to-be straight up don't report on their first day. I know this is probably a case of the employee getting a call back on an application for a better place, but a courtesy call would be nice. Waiting for an American to fill the job is still better than outsourcing to India.
As an Eastern European techbro (sadly not a unicorn) I can tell you this is absolutely happening. I work for a globehomo tech company on an American project, and besides the leadership everyone on my project is from around the bloc, nobody I know works on a project that's originated in Eastern Europe, our closest clients are the Germans.
India has over 100 million "untouchables". You'll never hear about it because Indians are inherently nationalistic and deeply ashamed of their culture -- remember that time they were utterly and completely dominated by a small island nation of dandy fops drinking tea and making the world's worst cuisine? We only import their priestly caste of course, who aren't actually interested in equality and spend their lives working towards the Indian Dream of driving a BMW and ensuring that their children are one day successful enough to drive a BMW.
Imagine importing millions and millions of people who believe in that shit while simultaneously screaming about how Americans are inherently racist.
