That still hurt plenty over the short term, and it’s important to remember that metrics aren’t people. If you were a mainframe developer in Cleveland who just g

That still hurt plenty over the short term, and it’s important to remember that metrics aren’t people. If you were a mainframe developer in Cleveland who just got laid off from a bank, it didn’t help your next mortgage payment to know that a company in San Francisco hired three people to build web apps even though the BLM’s national report would show a net gain of 2 jobs. This time we also have two big differences: most businesses are much further along on adopting IT (we’re unlikely to see the equivalent of the web boom in scale) and the internet’s ubiquity means that the alternatives often include replacing existing processes with SaaS services, which often requires fewer people than 80s/90s automation projects did or means they’re looking for someone to customize SAP, etc. and won’t consider you if your résumé doesn’t have the specific service they bought. I am not saying that doom is the correct outlook here but I do think it’s a good idea to really think about what a prolonged down market would mean personally. That’s especially true if you were, say, flying high at Google until a layoff and now are looking at things like a public sector job which is quite stable but has no prospect of paying better than half of what you used to make.