In Silicon Valley, a Flight to Safety

There are going to be some scary times. Of course, I have no idea how severely the credit problems will impact high tech - I could guess, but so could any other astute reader of the newspaper.

Personally, I think that if fears like this are enough to send you packing to a bigcorp, then you should probably be working for a bigcorp. This doesn't mean you're uncreative or overly fearful, bu the way. I've worked for bigcorps, and they actually aren't terrible (though I did work for Sun Micro, which is (or at least was) very laid back for a bigcorp). But I have so much more impact on the small startup-ish company I work for now.

If you want to live in the edgier world of startups and small companies, well then you're going to have to stare down some fears. These fears aren't meaningless.

I have a suggestion for anyone considering acting on the information in the WSJ article. I suggest that maybe the author of the article has a friend or two in the human-resources department of one of those big tech companies or maybe some executive or lobbyist for a big tech company or industry bought the author a nice lunch or vacation. So before acting on the information in the article, since verifying is easy and inexpensive (by e.g. finding an online forum with employees on it but not employers), I suggest verifying it with a half dozen or so people in the industry you are in.