[packetlost]

I don't recall there being regular, industry-wide layoffs effecting software engineers for basically the entirety of my career up until the last couple of years. I'm sure my memory is bad and there's data to refute that, but this doesn't feel like "normal" at all.

[wbl]

If your career was entirely post GFC you lived through the good times. The GFC and dot com crash were not good.

[giancarlostoro]

So after 2007 for people like me who arent used to the GFC acronym. Which in my case, I was 17 in 2007 and “shielded” from all of that.

[int_x]

For others like me: GFC = Global Financial Crisis

[tunesmith]

I went through the dotcom crisis and never heard of GFC until today. I've always seen it as the finsys crash.

[akirkland2]

To non-Americans, "global financial crisis" is the standard name we use for it. Inside the US (at least from my experience, when I lived there a few years ago) it was just financial crisis (without "global"), or the housing crash. Draw from that what conclusions you will about how Americans see their place in the world ;)

[mixmastamyk]

I worked straight through the dotcom, ‘08 financial crisis, and covid craziness. But recently haven’t worked in over two years, with nothing on the horizon. Definitely not normal over here.

[tayo42]

Nearly 20 years then...

[9rx]

The GFC wasn't good? It wasn't good for the general economy, sure, but given the specific industry we are talking about that was one of the best times ever. Money was being printed hand over fist building software that did nothing more than emit a fart sound. The opportunities for us with the 'picks and shovels' were endless with everyone trying to strike gold at the App Store gold mine.

[wbl]

It took a bit for the VC world to heat up and a lot of big companies had laid people off.

[mvdtnz]

The iPhone app store mania is not at all representative of the state of industry as a whole. Most software jobs did not look like this, at all.

[9rx]

It is unclear what you mean. It is true that most software jobs were not writing iPhone apps, if that is what you are trying to say, but those were good jobs. Those who didn't have good jobs for a moment were quickly scooped up by investors trying to create the next big app. It was a feeding frenzy out there for tech workers, despite much of the rest of the economy faltering (agriculture also did very well during the GFC, to be fair).

Maybe you are trying to say that there was some grey beard Atari programmer out there who refused to start writing iPhone apps and couldn't find their dream job banging bits on the old 2600? That is likely, but it is equally likely that they never found that job since either.