When it came time to look for new employment, companies were generally impressed with my ability to make money in new and creative ways. My advice now to people struggling to break into the industry is to make some money with programming however they can. Coders who can Leetcode their way out of an algorithm are a dime a dozen. Programmers who are familiar with the infrastructure modern applications need to handle payments, send emails, preserve data in storage, and maintain uptime as a distributed cloud system, are much more valuable. They stand out from the pack because they are capable of the leadership and innovation that companies desperately need.
2) look at your resume, and think what you can do in the short term to improve it.
3) your reputation can precede you; if you get laid off, try to make sure you go out in a professional manner that will cause people who end up at other companies (that might be hiring) to think well of working with you again.
4) when unemployed, it can be tempting to get lazy; make it a requirement that you do something every day towards getting a job, even when you don't feel like it. Make a project plan on how you will find a job (what job boards to check on, what skills to brush up, etc.), and hold yourself to it in a way that keeps you in a work-like mindset.
5) if you haven't interviewed in a long time, look at each opportunity to interview as a chance to practice, because interviewing is definitely something one can do better or worse, even for the same actual job skills. Even if you're not sure you would want the job, take the interview as if you might, because you might be surprised, and also you at least get interview practice.
1) Go someplace that looks boring but solid like health care. Pay might not be as good, projects might not seem as outwardly sexy, but it will be a solid paycheck.
2) Go someplace like a Google or Microsoft, IE: big tech, where even if one team is having cutbacks another will be hiring.
In the 2008+ timeframe... maybe it was the niche I was in, but I really didn't see much of a tech slowdown. I was contracting for part of that, and in a down economy companies like contractors so that they are expendable.
I personally never witnessed reasonable quality engineers not able to move around and find work (outside a short 6ish month window during the peak of the dot com bust), sure it took a little longer for some, but we are still talking like 2-3 months. I changed jobs twice during the dot com bust and recovery as well as during the 2008 cycle, but I had solid experience. The people who were mainly laid off were the inexperienced that didn't have a tech degree. e.g. where companies took a chance on training them to fill a tech role which they were struggling to fill during the boom cycle. People regardless of degree or no-degree that had 5-10 years did fine generally, and 10+ years did well as long as you were reasonable in salary requests.
The biggest issue I saw was salaries stagnated for a really long time and companies took advantage of the job market to hold the salary growth down. To be clear, salaries didn't go down so much as they just leveled off and stayed there for WAY too long IMO.
There was some good that came from the dot com bust. The market weeded out all the speculative job seekers who had no business writing code. It removed a lot of the poorly ran companies, and it forced companies to pay attention to the fundamentals. So it wasn't all bad either, and I think we were healthier after for quite a while.
Hopefully this cycle turns into another correction and we clean up some stuff and it happens quickly. Nothing says it has to be a horrid all or nothing event, most recessions aren't. 2008 was unusually tough on a lot of people but left the tech area relatively unscathed. This one won't be quite the same, but HNWP & LP's need to still put their money to work, so there will still be plenty of money for decent companies. And tech is everywhere and not optional for companies anymore, so there will be a market for good engineers and like positions.
Salary stagnation may be more painful this time around, due to higher inflation.
My advice is to have emergency funds saved up that can last you at least 6 months or more. And always build a network even during good times - it pays off when job searching during recession.
Always good to cut costs as far as you can to make sure you have cash saved in case it really goes bad.
There was/is lot of money slushing around in startups/companies that are not doing well for traditional standards (p/e for instance); they might fall quickly when things get worse. If you work in one of those, you might already want to try to jump over to a (big) traditional corp that is running healthy profits. Something boring that hasn’t been propped up with a lot of vc money or hype. Might pay less but it will probably weather the storm.