Do you think this will seriously affect job opportunities for devs? I'm an almost-grad who switched from electrical engineering because the jobs were abysmal, and the bad luck seems to be following me :-)
Networking. Sales. Domain knowledge.
As an undergrad myself, I feel most of my peers expect a job to be given to them as soon as they graduate. For some this will be true, for many it will not. I feel that this is a terrible mindset and will cause a lot of pain for people in our age group.
So networking, as in know people, know companies, you don't have to be an extreme extrovert but put yourself out their and actively try to meet and build relationships with people in the industry.
Sales, as in selling yourself as the product. Practice interviews, enunciation, phone conversations, whatever you have to do. If you come across as an A-player/personality you are much more likely to be hired.
Domain knowledge, get a basic understanding of what's in use today, what probably will be in use tomorrow, and build an expertise in it. It requires a lot of time but it will clearly distinguish you from those who don't bother doing so. While many companies prioritize hires that can learn quickly, don't forget the very real business need of someone who can jump in and run with the team immediately. If you have this there will always be a place for you at some company, you would only need to find one with a real immediate need, then, "oh hey I can do that for you"..
Go to conferences. If you're short on cash, go to where a conference is being held and hang out in the halls chatting people up. Maybe security will kick you out, maybe they won't. Maybe they aren't even checking who is going into the BOF sessions at night.
Go that one year old's birthday party you were invited to being thrown by that older coworker of yours that you kinda know. Maybe you'll meet an interesting person who turns out to be your boss in ten years.
There's lots of ways to meet people, it's just not going to get thrown on your lap anymore. You gotta go out and find it.
Honestly you're better off starting your career at a middle point or low point in the market rather than a high point. You'll be better calibrated for the ups and downs and you are far more resilient and flexible.
I graduated in 2009, when there were no jobs and it was awful. I slowly climbed my way to Google and on into an exciting future.
The dotcom bust per-capita was worse than the autoindustry layoffs in the 80s. I lived through it. It was very hard, and some people I know were out of jobs for 2 years. Our company had half a dozen layoffs in 12 months and we shrank by 50%. If 2016 is half of what 2001 was, then most new grads won't get jobs.
You have admitted you didn't go through the 2001 bust, so you, by definition, have no idea what it was like. Dismissing talk of 2016 being a bad year as doom-saying, exaggerating or self-aggrandizing clearly shows you have no idea how bad it can get for the industry as a whole. I don't care if you were unemployed and living in a car for 18 months in 2009/2010, because it's irrelevant to the point. There are plenty of people unemployed and living in cars even during the dotcom boom. But 2009/2010 weren't anything compared to the depths of the dotcom bust.
2008-2009 wasn't anywhere near as bad for the overall tech job market.
I don't think this is true. There's one study that found that students who graduate into a recession have worse earnings even long after the recession has ended: http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html
Eventually the effect wears off, but there's no evidence of a long-term benefit to graduating into a bad economy.
There is a general cooling off, not a collapse. There aren't many companies going under entirely, which is distinctly unlike the first dotcom bubble where after the pop the ground was littered with the corpses of companies.
IMO what we're likely to see is a slowdown in early-stage startup hiring. Series-A and B funding is already harder to come by, and so execs will be more conservative about burn rate, including on payroll. Unicorns will continue to hire aggressively, but their equity will look worse and worse as their valuations get cut or they get murdered in the aftermath of their own IPO.
I think we will continue to see major unicorns have their valuations slashed, and we will continue to see tech stocks struggle in the public markets. But this will impact employee compensation more than it will impact overall demand for new hires. What this probably will mean is that offers from unicorns will be less attractive next to offers from BigTechCo, but ultimately we're still talking about offers in the top 10% of the entire USA, so it's hardly a cause for panic.
And of course the juggernauts of AmaGooFaceSoft and co. will continue to hire like crazy.
So yeah, the job market will get a bit softer, so you might be facing tougher competition, but it's not exactly doom and gloom.
It's certainly still a better outlook than what you were facing in electrical engineering.