I wasn't working then, but from my understanding (might be wrong), it was 'html coders' that had difficulty finding jobs, not actual coders.
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.)