There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.
Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak. Easily. It felt like every company on earth (at least in tech) was crashing and firing people. Even high-flyers like Google absolutely stopped hiring.
If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.
> Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak
And we're still technically in the boom part of the cycle. I wonder how bad it will be after the actual crash.
> There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech.
How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.
It's incomparable the difference now compared with say layoffs in 2022
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
Of course if you only go back as far as 2022 it’s massive right now. Consider dotcom bubble burst or 2008 and it’s actually still not as bad (although I believe it will soon become so).
> How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I meant the layoffs due to AI, not the typical tech tech layoffs that are as old as tech itself.
But there are not that many layoffs clearly due to Ai, this one sure is not
You literally said: "There has never been a time in last 40 years..."
So now you are claiming that AI has been causing tech layoffs for 40 years now?
Not sure I understand. If getting laid off in the current environment is extra terrifying then why will people volunteer to get laid off?