I'm young, please when was that and in what industry
An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months, found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping burgers.
That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers" into a meme.
I feel like there are a lot of people in school or recently graduated though that had FNG dreams and never considered an alternative. This is going to be very difficult for them. I now feel, especially as tech has gone truly borderless with remote work, that this downturn is now way worse than the .com bust. It has just dragged on for years now, with no real end in sight.
covid overhiring + AI usage = massive layoff we ever see in decades
There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be.
The key point is that the going is still exceptionally good. The posts talking about experienced programmers having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an exaggeration.
History always repeats itself in the tech industry. The hype cycle for LLMs will probably peak within the next few years. (LLMs are legitimately useful for many things but some of the company valuations and employee compensation packages are totally irrational.)