[wyclif]

That's pretty myopic. People go through periods of unemployment for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they had a child, or wanted to travel the world. I have a computer scientist friend who took 6 months off to hike the Appalachian Trail (no, really). According to this logic, he would be a no hire. It would be the company's loss though, and I wonder if that company would be one writing blog posts about how "it's impossible to hire technical talent."

[orijing]

That's certainly true in tech now, when companies are scrambling to get any talent they can. But the unemployment in many other sectors of the economy is much higher, and there's not much of a competition between companies for talent.