Software engineering is far more saturated than it was in 2000 and 2008. In 2008, Amazon, Apple, and Google all had a seemingly endless room to grow. The iPhone, Android, AWS, and video steaming were still in their infancy. There's nothing like that right now. There are definitely a lot of exciting innovations in ML and VR, but I think it will be a while before these technologies find a mainstream consumer use case.
In 2000 some people still worked with paper rolodex. We need to keep things in perspective. The world changed massively in the last 20 years, everything is software and software is almost everything. There are a lot of contributing factors to this economy which are unrelated to the actual demand and value of software. There will not be an oversaturation of software engineering for a while to come.
If memory serves, Meta is cutting a lot of non tech jobs. Engineers might lose their jobs if entire projects are scrapped, but maybe a different position will be offered to them.
I hope that everyone is looking at Twitter and learning what not do: no company wants to beg some engineers to come back after being too quick to pull the trigger.
