Eric Hwang’s Story

Working in New York, I'm sure this is a very common answer, but 9/11 impacted my job at the time greatly, and also affeceted my career. At the time, I was working for Sapient, one of the "little five" internet consulting firms that had been super hot during the dot-com boom. We were smart, confident, and arrogant, and weren't shy to let it be known. We spent too much money on designer garbage cans and offices that were total wastes of space (but looked cool). Then the bubble started to burst. Sapient managed to stay relatively okay by shifting the majority of its New York business to the financial sector. And then 9/11 happened.

Our office at the time was on the Jersey City waterfront, directly across from the World Trade Center. My co-workers who were in the office early saw, and felt, the impact of the airplanes, from our office. Our building was used as atriage center, and the view out of the windows of our office was the wreckage of the Twin Towers. For a few weeks in January, I had to work on-site at Deutschebank, which was just a few blocks from ground zero. I had to take a ferry over from Jersey City, and could smell the asbestos in the air everywhere in the financial district every day.

9/11 accelerated the demise of the dot-com boom, and especially the Wall Street projects that Sapient had been relying on, and three months later, 90 percent of my team, including myself, were laid off. I went from there to my least favorite job, a programming position I was in no way qualified for, where I lasted 5 months, before going to a company whose business model was tricking people into installing pop-up ad software. Any job at that time was a good job. It took a while to get my career back on track, and though I can look back on it with humor now, those were not the most jovial of times.