[mquirion]

This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists."

In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.

[ben7799]

This, think companies going out of business left and right. Not 5-15% layoffs after the company doubled or tripled in size over 2-3 years.

Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months or a year and came back with huge pay cuts.

Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers in their house they took when the company closed and management/investors didn't want any of it.

I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.

[ghaff]

I was lucky enough to grab a new position through someone I knew fairly quickly. But, in the month it took for the company to actually extend an offer, I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else. And I definitely knew people who just got out of the industry.

[RHSeeger]

I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was miserable.