[raincom]

Economy affects home prices in the far away prices first: tracy, stockton, brentwood, etc. It does not impact home prices in, say, Palo Alto, that much, because homeowners in Palo Alto can hang on to their homes during the downtime.

I have not heard much about layoffs. Yes, Microsoft Mountain View has moved employees to Redmond. Netapp been laying off since 2011. Cisco is the same thing.

Unless the stock market crashes, the economy can absorb all developers, etc. Middle management, I donno.

[throwaway8843]

The 2 big companies to watch for layoffs this year are Paypal and Yahoo. Could be thousands each.

Paypal is just grossly overstaffed.

Yahoo is under pressure from investors to return the Alibaba proceeds to investors and cut their staff in half. (Some investors would like Yahoo to shut down and sell their campus off. Yahoo has no value as a going concern.)