Haven't tried, but I've been doing this for several decades and it has always been hard to find good people and 10 years on you can't even remember which years were the downturns and which were the booms.
Agreed... it was more segmented at the time, as employment was more regional... so seemed to affect the West coast more/earlier... didn't hit Phoenix until nearly a year after it was already bad in NorCal. Was out for about a year, and it was rough, to say the least. Was denied unemployment because I had done side work the year prior, and all that had dried up too.
Took almost 8 months to be working again (at half where I was prior) and a few years to get back to that level again. Given the number of remote workers, can see the effects being broader and more impactful much more quickly if it keeps going this way.
This time I have a house and other people relying on me... so it's a bit scarier. I'm on C2H right now, after getting let go in October, and just hoping to convert to FTE in the next couple months. Fortunately, in an industry unlikely to be affected by the tech downturn.
I don't know if it was so much regional--except as a side effect of different regions having different types of companies. It was probably mostly startups, especially web-related startups, that took the brunt of the initial impact and the contagion probably spread at a rate more or less related to the degree of exposure to the startup ecosystem. There were some other areas like optical networking too.
The company I was laid off from had a lot of exposure to startup spending whereas the one I was hired by mostly had big blue chip computer company clients which were (at the time) still only modest affected by dot-bomb.
Could be... the Phoenix area is generally more business and banking industry in terms of most software development jobs... even the startups that are here don't tend to operate in the same way as most of the rapid growth startups do, more about getting positive revenue and conservative growth earlier on. Though the couple I'm familiar with, still got bought/swallowed by larger companies as an exit.
Yep. live thru that myself - never got laid of in either the 2008 or 2000 busts, but I know a lot of folks in tech and finance (especially) that it took them years to find anything close to comparable once they were let go.
I am not yet convinced we are not heading there again.
I got laid off right after 9/11 and I was lucky enough to get an offer from the CEO at a very small company who I knew from prior work--and didn't get so much as a nibble anywhere else. Never earned as much as my relatively modest comp of the prior decade. Then 2008 rolled around and that didn't seem the best time to be beating the bushes for something else. But finally landed something new with someone else I knew in 2010 and that set me up pretty reasonably.
I even remember the 1998 'crash'. I am convinced we are heading there again, but in much slower motion. It may never hit rock bottom, but we are definitely not in a bullish market at this point.
I got laid off in 2009. It took me roughly six months to find something new, and this was with three years of experience and transition from driver development in C to full-stack web development. I got a token raise in the process. In hindsight, 2008 wasn't fun, but it wasn't that bad.
That said, I could see this being worse than 2008 for tech. Parts of tech really did binge on hiring in 2020 and 2021. In 2007, companies were just getting over the scars of 2000.
