What was your experience during the GFC?
It was actually a dual crisis. Just a few months before the housing market implosion fuel spiked from a little over $2 per gallon to above $4 per gallon setting price records. This crippled the transportation sector of the economy. Just before they could get that pricing under control the housing market imploded and the stock market went into a freefall.
I was working at Travelocity at the time which at that time was owned by travel monolith Sabre. The fuel issue hit the travel industry hard enough for massive layoffs then the economy fell through. 2008 was the first year I started learning programming. I was hired to Travelocity in late 2007 as a designer and after a few months of doing nothing I was involuntarily reclassified to a front-end developer. I had to learn to program.
2008 was a rough year performance wise as I was trying to figure out programming on my own on the fly. My annual evaluation was almost a career killer. Then in early 2009 all the layoffs came. All kinds of talented people and high performers were pushed out the door. My job was safe though. By safe I mean super stellar safe. Nobody could (still can't) hire competent JavaScript developers. Keep in mind this was before jQuery or React was there to do your job for you.
Then I went off on a military deployment to Afghanistan in mid-2009 a few months after all the layoffs. When I came back to Travelocity I set two records in the company. I earned three major separate raises in 2010 which included a promotion and those raises nearly doubled my salary.