Where I am, 2008 wasn’t too bad in tech, but the aftermath of the dotcom bust was like the end of Infinity War, just there one day and then gone.
No-one expects their career to end at the gilded hand of a giant purple alien.
At the same time, the web had only proven that regular people were willing to try it, but there was no meaningful consumer or advertiser money flowing through it for another ten years. So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. When the music stopped it was a bloodbath because there was so little actual revenue.
I don't see the same thing happening now because the web is firmly embedded in our lives and someone needs to maintain all this code. I'm honestly more worried about environmental threats and the sustainability of our way of life than the economy per se.
This could describe today, with crypto (tech still looking for solutions to problems that aren't scams), AI (great potential but mostly in a gimmick phase right now), and VCs coming from a decade of record-low rates causing extreme valuations across the board ($5M seed rounds, etc).
If you exclude Big Tech (which also took a beating but is managing), the smaller tech scene is ripe for a disruption of a very uncomfortable kind.
I’m pretty happy for all those sectors to tank, they don’t produce value that people would pay for, while we struggle finding competent people for product startups generating 500k per employee.
Do the hard tasks and I pay you exactly this amount. People are, really, so lazy. Yes there is some jQuery in the app, well it’s not the bane of the world, and yes we gotta interact with customers, horror, well deal with it and I pay you exactly the revenue it generates.
But of course everyone wants to have K8s and microservices on their resume, rather than building something people want.
I’ve said almost that to my senior, but he keeps hating the jQuery app. It’s fine with me, but don’t complain.
The problem is that most of the people I've talked to were employed at huge, profitable companies that made actual products. So it was just a blip for them.
I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends..
Understanding and adapting to those changes are key. Next up -> IOT - computers in everything - applying AI - Biotech - ? Generally something expensive has to become cheap for the masses. Hayes modems took $1200 - $2000 devices down to <$300. Ethernet made LANs cheap. Twitter made stupidity availability massively scalable for zero dollars:)
Those jobs never really came back as websites became more "Dynamic" and CMSes began to proliferate: So rather than hiring 20 web developers converting copy and design to websites you could hire a 1-3 engineer(s) to customize and run your CMS and non-technical people can provide the content.
But no small number of people, including many who had worked at large firms, basically left tech.
A good reminder that economic downturns can be actually healthy for people, families, and the environment. With less money, people will drive less, travel less, drink less, eat less meat, spend more time with loved ones, etc etc
It really hit hard about 2 years later in 2003, when all non-web contract work dried up and clients started having trouble paying for work you’d already done. That was really brutal for me, personally. I was also selling some software in addition to doing the contracting. I got really lucky and someone saw my products and wanted to license them for their particular niche. I was just barely able to hang on until a year later when things mostly returned to normal.
If it hadn’t worked out, I probably could have taken a job doing some development work I hated if I really had to. There were still openings, but they were at places like Accenture, or whatever a small-time version of them would be.