[doktrin]

I agree. I remember the job market of 07-09, and appreciate being contacted by recruiters. In fact, I typically respond to most them in order to politely decline.

I'm too young to remember the post-dot-com years, but those weren't a walk in the park either (to put it very mildly).

[jaredsohn]

In 2004, craigslist listed only about ten tech jobs per day for the Bay Area.

Also, LinkedIn wasn't all that popular, there was no Hacker News, there was no Twitter, Facebook, etc., meetup didn't have organizers (so often it was just a collection of people showing up at a restaurant and chatting about some subject.)