I work for a Fortune 200 company. Our policy - publicly stated even - is to keep a large contingent of consultants on staff so they can be easily "adjusted" to

I work for a Fortune 200 company. Our policy - publicly stated even - is to keep a large contingent of consultants on staff so they can be easily "adjusted" to right-size operations. That's a double-edge sword: consultants are the first to be let go but they're also the first to be hired. I was a consultant during 9/11 and the ensuring economic meltdown, made worse by major Y2K projects wrapping up. Consultants were let go en masse. It was extremely difficult at the time to get new work because so few people were hiring either employees or consultants and for those that were there were hundreds of candidates trying to get that one job. Contrast that to a couple of years earlier where they were literally throwing around tens of thousands of dollars in sign-on bonuses. Once you've been around this industry long enough you'll see this cycle repeat every 7 years or so (1987, 1994, 2001, 2008, 2015 - not so much, and now 2022). It's the IT boom-bust cycle.