One thing to focus on is how much of the crash was telecom vs. dot.com companies. An excess of fiber was laid, which was a boon to later companies like Google which bought dark fiber at low prices, competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...) rose and fell based on changing law and regulations in the US, equipment manufacturers like Lucent were at the whip end of demand, especially since they financed a lot of the purchases of the equipment they were selling, and some of the biggest Internet service providers blew up in one way or another, see Worldcom for example.

The hype? Largely justified, even if the timing was off, there's no denying this has become a very big thing, note Amazon was founded in 1994. For me getting a job was no different than getting one prior to the Internet really taking off in this first wave.

BjoernKW's comments about the job being not tightly defined, and being responsible for many things including raw hardware matches my experience. And "cloud" alternatives to your own hardware, even if installed at a colo, weren't an option, weren't even for the start of 2nd batch of companies following the crash. And like his experience, one of the companies I worked for in the late 1990s lasted through it and way beyond, was independent until a few years ago when they were bought and folded into another company.

One very big difference is that the IPO exit option largely ended for most companies, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 seems to have been the tipping point.