The tech bubble affected more on investors than on CS graduates. I don’t recall that CS majors had very poor job prospects during the dot com crash 1999-2003. I actually made most money during the period from 2000 to 2007. What I remember most was the pain that many engineers, physicists, aircraft designers,… who worked for the defense industries and lost their jobs when the military bugdet was cut from 1995 to 2001. The termination of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star War), the closure of military bases, and the military downsizing caused a lot of job loss throughout the entire nation during that period. Some hardware engineers I knew were not able to find jobs for more than two, three years. Some of them had to go back to school for retraining or switched career. The software engineers were least affected. They were able to switch to commercial jobs quicker.