The great displacement is already well underway?

As someone who recently went through similar experiences and ended up moving out of the US to get employed again - AI isn’t really the cause (as in AI making people redundant), it’s an excuse, and a different kind of cause - increasing confusion, fear, and automating the BS causing confusion and fear. It’s allowing weaponized FUD at a scale previously unimaginable.

The real cause is changes to numerous structural factors in short succession (widespread sudden allowance of remote work, changes in interest rates, changes in taxation methods, etc.) finally breaking the nearly uninterrupted 20 year up-and-to-right software Eng compensation boom. And once that ‘up and to the right’ line starts to look like it might down ‘down and to the right’? Everyone starts doing the math and the oh shits start.

It was similar-but-different in ‘01 as part of the dot-com crash, including referral only hires, some metro areas (including Seattle) being mostly dead for hiring, employers requiring absurd qualifications and then not hiring anyway, etc.

It’s a brutal mess, and anyone who already has some emotional damage? Doubly so.

Eventually, like ‘01, the smoke will clear and an entirely different landscape will emerge. Some people will have been lucky and have not experienced any issues at all, others will have been dragged through hell.

Who is in what group will have had little to do with skill set or qualifications, though everyone will have their own story spinning it one way or the other.

Overall, the industry will be much smaller. Some people will have kept (or made) fortunes, many will have lost the ones they had.

Remembering the dot-com crash of '01, when the tech jobs aint there, they simply aint there, and no amount of c.v / resume polishing will change that. No-one should take this personally. At times like that its maybe best to do something else to earn a living. 2001-3 I did a couple of ski seasons in a hotel, unrelated to tech. In early 2004 got a not-fantastically-paid-but-using-good-skills job with a startup, then mid-2005 a new job with a return to "proper rewards that recognised my skills". So, sometimes that market is down, and you gotta be flexible. People worry about forgetting all their skills. That didn't really happen to me, but I mucked about with Linux on the side, and that was useful for getting the next job. Not sure what today's equivalent is. AI muddies the waters here. Of course, when you have a family, being without tech compensation can be a problem. My answer to that is, its essential when entering the tech industry, to recognise it as a "feast-and-famine" / "manic-depressive" industry. One day it pays big bucks. Next day no jobs. So, manage expenses and financial commitment accordingly and put something aside.

Yup. The challenge I think a lot of people are having is that ‘01 was 24 years ago, so for a sizable percentage of the industry (80-90%?) it’s outside of their living memory. Certainly outside of their professional experience.

It’s a harsh change from the prior ‘always get a raise when you change jobs, barely have to interview, change jobs every year’ type bubble that has been expanding for a very long time.

yeah for me it's a capital starvation issue, 5 years ago I got millions to fund a vague idea and would hire left and right for the price you'd give, didn't matter. Now I'm building a sustainable business with the little funding available and growth and success is severly limited by the lack of capital, 150k/year would be almost half our entire company salaries. I won't mind increasing salaries for everyone including myself as we grow and become profitable, but right now that would just be suicide. Appart from big corps that are just increasing profit margins and dividends, I wouldn't be surprised if lots of small businesses are in a similar situation where they would love to hire seniors but the pool that was dumped by big businesses is just too expensive for them. Would be interesting to see the job market as a stock market I'm pretty sure atm lots of these 150k/year profiles would now be 75k/year max since the big corps dumped their stock. Smaller businesses don't have that kind of capital since VC dried up.