New research tracking American IT workers before and after the dot-com bubble finds those who jumped into the boom earned 7-8% less than their peers fifteen years later.
If you are thinking of switching careers into AI for the higher salaries and upside, run this calculation first: how fast do skills go stale in a hyped industry?
Johan Hombert of HEC Paris and Adrien Matray of the Atlanta Fed tracked highly skilled US workers who entered IT around the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
Earn more at the start, lose by the end
During the run-up, up to a quarter of America's top talent piled into tech and telecom. IT workers at the time earned 5% to 10% more than comparable peers.
When the bubble burst, businesses failed and layoffs followed. Even those who kept their jobs lost out: by 2005 tech pay fell below their peers, and fifteen years on the gap had widened to 7% to 8%.
Skills expire faster than you think
The reason is skill depreciation. In the 1990s the hottest job was 'web designer' — that role barely exists today.
People who wrote http code and laid out pages were quickly rendered obsolete. Their market value slid, and whatever extra they once earned was not nearly enough to make up for it.
One honest takeaway: when you chase a hot sector, you catch the starting salary, not the whole career curve.
Why it matters
Young people switching paths and mid-career professionals retraining to code see it as getting on a fast train. But this study uses real data from the dot-com era to warn that a boom sector's high pay may come with skill obsolescence and a post-bubble cooldown that leaves you earning less than peers in boring industries for the next decade and more.
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