And learn how to job search. There's surely a better job that guy could have found.
I got my first tech job in 1996 doing QA for a COBOL compiler vendor in San Diego. It paid $15/hour and there were multiple applicants with physics & engineering Ph.Ds and years of experience! The detail which is more sobering the older I get is that the company figured – correctly, I'm sure – that the more experienced applicants were likely to leave as soon as they could find something better, so it didn't matter how willing anyone was to take any job available.
Sure, the market eventually recovered and some people repurposed all of that Cold War tech to make things like carbon-fiber golf clubs and bicycles commonplace but that's hardly going to help the person who went from living the American dream to struggling just to make the next mortgage payment, pay for their kid's braces or college tuition, etc. Even if they did eventually find a job, let alone one which pays comparably, it can take years to recover financially even if nothing else happens.
My family hired an EE to do electrical engineering in ~1972 and he was thrilled to be able to get back to it after doing all sort of random service jobs including "cleaning toilets" (the latter might have been exaggerated to me to motivate working hard to get into college), I learned a whole lot from him.
He said before he got that job he was thinking his retirement would be to a cardboard box.
[1] Friend pulled my dads application out of a pile of about 500 and stuck it on the top. If you ever want to know what petty corruption is, that's it.
For that matter, certainly nowadays higher oil prices can mean more business for airplane companies as that makes buying more efficient planes more important.
Take marine shipping as a similar case. Recent vessels were desiggned for high-cost fuel and slow sreaming, or so they tell us. But petroleum prices, and bunker fuel, have plummetted.
Hulls last 20+ years.
And shipping overall is down. Problem is demand-side.
Really ? All economic indicators (manufacturing index, employment, ...) seem to indicate otherwise. If problem is indeed demand side, wouldn't you see a serious crash right about now ?
Look up shipping indices. Baltic Dry Index, etc. All massively down since mid-2015.
Asset price inflation isn't economic growth.
And a strengthening labour market would see rising wages. They're rather curiously not. For some decades now.
I've not heard that before - what clue did it give him?
Issued an ultimatum that we would not attend the upcoming Summer Olympics held in Moscow if they did not withdraw. That really showed them!
Grain export embargo, which only hurt us, and is generally considered to be immoral in a non-hot war context, as Reagan pointed out.
Reinstated draft registration, which did not go down well after he'd pardoned Vietnam era draft dodgers on his first day in office.
Reversed course with relations with Pakistan, which he'd previously trashed, and with it supported the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets.
In theory reversed course and started rearming, although due to the budget cycle that pretty much had to be proposals that would only be fulfilled by the next president, which of course didn't turn out to be him (note that Wikipedia's entries on him are silent on this general issue, you have to e.g. go to the B-1 bomber page to learn of his canceling it, and how difficult a decision he said it was).
* All the companies than need any engineering based work done can take their pick of the best.
* But remember their normal recruitment channels are still open and feeding potential employees through. They may prefer to hire fresh talent rather than a 50 year old.
* And other engineering companies will be affected. If your aircraft company lays off 30% of its employees then it probably does so because it has less orders on its books. Therefore the smaller companies making parts for the aerospace industry have less orders and will be firing rather than hiring.
* Even worse large job losses tend to be correlated with a generalised or sector wide downturn. So car companies and ship companies and bridge companies may also be in a situation where there is less demand and be firing rather than hiring.
* The local economies of the places where the engineers were fired from will be affected. Skilled workers tend to support several service workers and when the skilled workers are laid off the service sectors are affected (you don't go out to a restaurant or get your house done up if you've just lost your job).
* If people move away from towns/cities due to lost work then the property prices tend to fall. A family with a mortgage may be (or feel that they are) better off holding onto their home and accepting much lower pay than accepting they have lost several $100,000 on the re-sale price of their home.
IBM was one of the few American companies that had no layoffs during the depression in the 30's.
Inventories built up. No sales. And he was almost fired.
Once the recovery started every company and govt in the world wanted a computer and the rest is history.
Also, things are a bit different today: IBM is largely a services company, which doesn't lend itself well to inventory building. Also, they have struggled on the merit of their offerings, not the economical climate, for a very long time. Doubling down right now is not obvisouly going to end well.
Disclaimer: this doesn't mean I'm better at the job search. I'm definitely not, and I'd be in the exact same position, of working bad jobs or mooching because I can't land anything between grocery store cashier and engineer. And a big part of the problem is thinking that e.g. someone capable of doing all the math involved in engineering "can't possibly" do the work of an accountant.
If the economy is down then companies don't hire many accountants, actuaries or analysts for the same reasons as they don't hire as many engineers. They also cut down on sales, management and most white collar jobs (and blue collar). So the hypothetical engineer is competing with experienced people for too few of these jobs as well. Similarly many companies prefer to hire recent graduates in these roles for the same reasons as with engineers.
Many middle class jobs also have a qualification based barrier to entry (e.g. from your list accountants and actuaries in the UK+) that makes a career change difficult in good times let alone bad.
+ the training for both of these is usually on the job but why would you hire an ex-engineer you need to train in a job market where excellent skilled hires and fresh young graduates are plentiful.
Those were dark days, man.
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Software engineers outside the valley, especially in the late 90s and early 2000's don't make ludicrous amounts of money. Even if you live frugally and save up, being suddenly laid off will lead you to burning through savings very quickly. It's not like retiring, you don't get the time to prepare.
Lastly, lack of empathy is not a virtue.
would i have made the same decision? no, i wouldn't have worked at the OSDL and would have preferred to burn out at another dotcom, but it did teach me how to live very frugally, and how to set money aside for rainy days.
now i try to keep at least a year's worth of living expenses, preferably 2-3, just to make sure i can survive the next one.
But even so in a big downturn you may find all your industry contacts are in the same boat as you are. I had a lot of friends in the web industry all out of work 2001-2004. And in a fast changing field 18 months out of work is bad news because your experience rapidly becomes obsolete.