I'm guessing you aren't old enough to remember the dot com bust then...
I believe that I am able to judge programming competence, and my bar for labeling poverty is not inaccurate.
They were, of course, a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who had no business calling themselves programmers having trouble. But there were still lots of them.
How do I know this? When I went to move from New York to the west coast in 2003, I took the precaution of taking a month to travel up down down the coast, so I could meet with people I knew and respected from online interactions. What I learned was that at the time, Portland was a disaster zone, Seattle almost as bad, Silicon Valley still had a huge hangover but was slowly on the road to recovery, and I should have no problem landing a job in Los Angeles. I therefore moved to Los Angeles and landed a job in about a week.
The rest of the Swedish economy was quite OK.
The takeaway lesson you should get kids, is that there is a boom/bust cycle for programmers/developers -- but it isn't necessarily in phase with the general economy. (Some corollaries about how to handle this were listed in the article.)
Today there are so many businesses that needs IT to stay competitive that we would need a bubble of incredible epic propertions to knock us all out. And honestly I doubt there are enough people who can pass as devs that it would even be possible.