[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