[davismwfl]

I was never laid off but I and had to lay some people off during the dot com bust, yet during the 2008 downturn my teams all grew in size (just a little slower than the prior years). Mainly what I saw was companies that had solid foundations, even if they were VC backed and unprofitable, did fine overall. They just had to be a bit less speculative and more calculating how they used their funds. Ones in speculative areas or doing weird shit got hammered and weeded out of the market fairly quick.

I personally never witnessed reasonable quality engineers not able to move around and find work (outside a short 6ish month window during the peak of the dot com bust), sure it took a little longer for some, but we are still talking like 2-3 months. I changed jobs twice during the dot com bust and recovery as well as during the 2008 cycle, but I had solid experience. The people who were mainly laid off were the inexperienced that didn't have a tech degree. e.g. where companies took a chance on training them to fill a tech role which they were struggling to fill during the boom cycle. People regardless of degree or no-degree that had 5-10 years did fine generally, and 10+ years did well as long as you were reasonable in salary requests.

The biggest issue I saw was salaries stagnated for a really long time and companies took advantage of the job market to hold the salary growth down. To be clear, salaries didn't go down so much as they just leveled off and stayed there for WAY too long IMO.

There was some good that came from the dot com bust. The market weeded out all the speculative job seekers who had no business writing code. It removed a lot of the poorly ran companies, and it forced companies to pay attention to the fundamentals. So it wasn't all bad either, and I think we were healthier after for quite a while.

Hopefully this cycle turns into another correction and we clean up some stuff and it happens quickly. Nothing says it has to be a horrid all or nothing event, most recessions aren't. 2008 was unusually tough on a lot of people but left the tech area relatively unscathed. This one won't be quite the same, but HNWP & LP's need to still put their money to work, so there will still be plenty of money for decent companies. And tech is everywhere and not optional for companies anymore, so there will be a market for good engineers and like positions.

[webmaven]

> The biggest issue I saw was salaries stagnated for a really long time and companies took advantage of the job market to hold the salary growth down. To be clear, salaries didn't go down so much as they just leveled off and stayed there for WAY too long IMO.

Salary stagnation may be more painful this time around, due to higher inflation.

[davismwfl]

Totally agree, it was different in 2001 and 2008/2009 as inflation wasn't a major factor, now inflation is essentially acting like an additional tax. So if people lose 8-10% for a couple of years and salaries stagnate I think we will see much different market condition especially for employment.