Exactly. To me this felt extremely similar to the post-dot-com bust. Back then, the joke was that anyone who could "fog a mirror" could get hired in tech. While

Exactly. To me this felt extremely similar to the post-dot-com bust. Back then, the joke was that anyone who could "fog a mirror" could get hired in tech. While the mechanics this time around are a bit different (we didn't have TikTok back then to chronicle "A day in the life at a FAANG food court..."), the outcome is very much the same: lots of easy money led to over-hiring, and when that spigot turns off, there are lots of layoffs, which (if you got laid off) feels like an outright depression because you have a huge number of laid off people now going after a much smaller pool of job openings. Also, just like in the dot com bust, companies really start laser focusing on roles that are directly tied to revenue, but anything that is even slightly tangential/"a luxury" gets cut. In a non-scientific perusal of my LinkedIn connections, most of the software devs and sales people I know who were laid off found work relatively quickly, but I've seen people in roles like recruiting, content marketing, UX research, and product managers that have in some cases been unemployed for over a year. Middle management also definitely had a major thinning out.