[ghaff]

And hopefully it won't get anywhere near dot bomb levels for tech.

I was very lucky to find a new (lower paying) position during that era and the company I joined subsequently barely got through some of the aftermath. But I knew a lot of people from technology companies who basically got out of the industry and, for at least some of them, their careers/finances never really recovered.

[alephnerd]

Amen to that!

At least talking to people who went through 2001 and 2008, it looks like there are more opportunities across the board now. If you got laid off from $randomYCStartup as a SWE or SRE, you can still land a decent paying IC role at one of the 100s of upper market companies that exist. BoA, Honeywell, Target, etc are still hiring SWEs and paying decent salaries, as are the hundreds of upper market B2B tech companies (eg. Okta, Meraki, Oracle, etc). It may not seem sexy like working at Google or Meta, but it ain't a bad living either. Sadly, a lot of my peers have this sense of hubris that anything less than FAANG or a late stage startup spending tens of millions of dollars in PR is career suicide, which is honestly stupid in an industry as skill oriented as ours

[shagie]

Fibber Magees, Mountain View (now St. Stephen's Green). Out of work people in tech at the pub at 2 in the afternoon. On their right, a beer. On their left, a pager that isn't buzzing (hoping for a message from a recruiter).

Talking to the guy who got a job serving gelato next door and a guy who is about to start work 3rd shift at Blockbuster as a cashier. They've got masters degrees in CS but when the company closed up quickly, they had to find a job quickly that paid some of their bills (rent in Mountain View wasn't cheap).

Those were not happy times.

I was fortunate. My manager had previously worked at Apple in the bad years and at the first signs of future possible problems had gotten two open reqs for our team approved all the way up the chain to the C level. While the reqs were approved she really dragged her feet on writing up the job position and after a bit, HR got tired (I presume) asking her and then we had a hiring freeze and well, that was the end of that... except that we had two C level approved reqs that were unfilled. Then contractors weren't renewed... and then contracts were ended early. When the layoff happened she was told to lay off two people from a team of four. She laid off the open reqs and pointed out that if the director levels were to force her to lay off some from the team, she would immediately rehire them back in to those open reqs. So, our team survived intact. That was 2001. However, in 2009 she wasn't my manager anymore (and had gone to do other things).

[xtracto]

I graduated from Software Engineering in 2001. Doing a 3 year postgrad degree was one of the best options work-wise at that dark time. We are not that deep, for now, at this time.

[ghaff]

Fortunately, I never needed to come up with a Plan B as I fairly quickly landed a job with someone I knew at a small competitor of the the company I was laid off from (which was still doing OK although that changed). But I never got so much as a nibble from anyone else.