2001-2002 was brutal; I'd built a career around a dying language & I wasn't living in a major tech hub. I lived off savings and contract work from a company tha

2001-2002 was brutal; I'd built a career around a dying language & I wasn't living in a major tech hub. I lived off savings and contract work from a company that was terrible, but had entrapped customers into their terrible software, so they had a steady cash flow. By 2008 I was in California and had been working for tech giants. When the housing bubble popped I was laid off but quickly landed at a non-profit. Fun fact: non-profits are exempted from H-1B caps; as long as you can get hired, you can stay. I worked for what most San Francisco techies would have considered laughable wages. On the other hand, working for that non-profit was probably the portion of my career that will have the highest impact on actual humans. Most tech industry jobs are the poem Ozymandias, except everything turns to dust in 4 years rather than 4,000. If you find yourself unemployed, it's probably better to be underemployed at a nonprofit.