Tech Layoffs Dot-Com Comparison

What you're seeing is really the same pattern as the late 90's dotcom boom-bust. Then, too, TONS of people (and their sisters and mothers) went into the "Information Superhighway" to become "WebMasters" and develop "Web Sites" for businesses large and small as more and more money plowed into those companies and a rush for talent, including not-very-much talent was drawn into the field because of the $. When the dotcom bust happened, and believe me, there w

For anyone with actual skill, nothing really changed. But then again, for people with actual skill nothing has really changed throughout the last 25 years, despite the crisis.Yes, there was a huge market through Y2K and the dot-com bubble for people who knew how to operate a keyboard, and that market collapsed. But those people where as much developers as I am a surgeon because I know how to apply a band-aid. Personally I was glad the bubble burst, because it became increasingly harder to avo

It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is flooded with candidates.There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a

Layoff for this tech boom but what about before the late 2000s?

I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to

High flying tech jobs bonanza is over. Check back in a couple of years

What’s happening now is very analogous to the 2000 dot.com crash. The economy overall will recover, albeit slowly. However companies are questioning why they need 100 engineers instead of 50. That doesn’t just reverse itself overnight. As the OP said those that weren’t around the last time might find it hard to believe that tech jobs really just disappear for years.

Relax. I started in IT in the early nineties, which in Europe weren't all that great. Not a lot of jobs for developers. Then it got crazy with the millennium bug hype. The sky was the limit! Companies had interviews at car dealerships and if you spelled your name mostly right, you had a well-paying job and rode out in a free brand new car.Then the dot-com bust happened. Oh no, everybody got laid off, there certainly was no future in IT. Until the market picked up like never before and ev

I was in tech during the dot com bubble. It was the same then as today. In the early 2000s, there were two open tech jobs for every qualified person. Businesses like Microskills (no longer around) sprung up to teach basic network administration and other IT skills and do job placement. When the market contracted, a lot of people who were treading water or were making more than their role could afford got pushed out. It's no different now. Instead of network admin bootcamps it's coding

We're in similar times to the 2000's era "dot com bubble burst". I got caught out in that fiasco, couldn't get a full time programming job for about 4 years. I scraped by freelancing, but I also had generosity of friends to help me out with rent. It was a long hard 4 years, every month was difficult just feeding myself. Then things turned around. I don't really know if it's going to turn around anytime soon this time, and the AI bubble is going to make it a who