| HN Mirror

Interesting comment, I relate to it. The recessions affected me pretty heavily. I'm in my late 40s. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, and was living in SoCal at the time which was really bad (military cutbacks hit the job market at the same time as the recession). The dot com crash hit later - I kept my job through it, but my wife's company went bankrupt and she had a lot of trouble getting back into it.

I think I internalized the notion that it's essential to have very specific and in demand job skills, and I am innately pessimistic about my general ability to adapt and learn on the job as a means of attaining employment. I suppose that's always true to an extent, but in the early 90s, only certain engineering grads were getting good jobs, there were a lot of coffee shop humanities majors. In the late 90s, during the boom, I felt a world of difference between myself and people just 5 years younger, who seemed to think the difference between college and the working world is that now your employer pays for the booze. Even the humanities majors tended to land pretty good jobs - and I don't just mean money, I mean the kind that start to build up your resume. The dot com crash definitely hit like a hurricane, though.

That said, 2008 was rough, wasn't it? My company went bankrupt and I did get a new job, but options weren't great. That said, I do agree that the tech workforce was hit more harshly in 2001.

People talk a lot about generational differences, but I think that there's a large and generally hidden difference in cohort. It can hit hard. For instance, graduating into a severe recession can really set you back. The reason is that you don't get good experience (you string together freelance and coffee shop jobs), and then 4 years later, the economy picks back up. The problem is, you're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and companies tend to recruit at the colleges (and may wonder, why has this guy done nothing relevant for the last 4 years?). I've read that the effects of graduating into a recession can be seen 10-20 later, and I'm not surprised. I think it's harder to get an entry ramp back on when the economy does improve, and I suspect that people may develop a more risk-averse mentality about what kind career path to pursue.