Post dot-com, a LOT of people basically left the industry. They may have continued on in somewhat adjacent roles but people can only afford to keep looking for the sort of employment they had for so long.
I'm sure you'll find a variety of answers. Often mid-management jobs in possibly tangentially related industries. Basically retired early, or pursued a hobby business, if they could afford to do so. In my case an industry analyst job for about ten years until I went back to marketing for a software company.
And lots of people early in their careers never got another job at the same level again.
One sysadmin I worked with ended up as a taxi driver. A core network engineer eventually retrained as a school lab technician. Two devs both spent a decade doing tech support at a call centre before bouncing out of tech altogether.
Things started picking up again around 2005-6, but for a couple of years there was nothing. Much, much worse than the Great Financial Crisis or anything that's happened since.
Yep. I was lucky and lucky I had a network. Lots of people probably ended up working at Starbucks or, at least, working in at best peripherally connected occupations that paid a fraction of what they were making or what they expected to make.
Certainly, in my case, lucky as I was, it wasn't until my next job that I was really making "good" compensation a decade or so later.
There was a period when the $200K-$300K job was a given for many in development. Easy for that to vanish in a puff.
Yeah. I was lucky enough to connect with someone I knew in a tech job--albeit one that wasn't that great paying especially after a pay-cut at the worst of the downturn.
It eventually translated into a very good end of career job but a lot of people ended up in "would you like fries with that?" positions. I had luck but it was by no means guaranteed.
I won't disagree. A lot of people got marginal jobs--maybe associated with the industry or maybe not. I was luck enough to have a network but I knew plenty of people who just faded away.