[nostrademons]

20% YoY increases is about right in boom times. My rent increased by about $300/month/year from 2011-2014, then has been roughly stable since then. It was stable from 2009-2011 though.

In 2009, most of the startups were really small Web 2.0 outfits with 2-6 employees. However, the big companies were laying off people, and very few companies were hiring. I was initially going to apply to E-Bay/PayPal (I had a contact there), but the day that I was going to apply they announced they were laying off 5000 people, and I was like "Welp, that's not happening." My roommate worked at EMC and went through 3 rounds of layoffs, with about 3/4 of her department laid off. Was very lucky to end up at Google, which according to the news media was in hiring freeze (like everyone else) at the time; I had an awkward conversation with my recruiter where I was like "Are you actually hiring right now, or am I wasting my time?" What tended to happen was that the big companies cherry-picked the startup founders/employees that they really wanted and laid off all their low performers, and everyone who didn't have a track record of producing stuff was basically fucked.

I wasn't around for the dot-com bust in 2001 or the 1991 recession, but my understanding is that they were far worse in Silicon Valley, because the dot-coms had hired a large number of underskilled workers who literally had nobody willing to hire them when their employers went bust. I suspect 2017 will be worse than 2009 but better than 2001 in tech; unicorns collectively employ many more people (particularly low-skilled people) than Web 2.0 startups, but the crash this time is a slow-motion slowdown and doesn't seem to be affecting all companies, and so there's time for stronger companies to pick up the pieces of weaker ones.

[pault]

2009 and (allegedly) 2017 are nothing like 2001. Within one week, my office building (in Seattle) went from being completely full of startups to 50% occupancy. I distinctly remember one day walking around and seeing multiple people in their offices crying with their heads in their hands. The whole market basically disappeared overnight. I had only been working for a year at that point, so I was completely screwed. It was 3 years before I could get an entry level job in the industry again (at 2/3 of my previous salary). Anyway, what's this about a crash? I've been job hunting and every company I've interviewed with says they are having difficulty finding people.