Ask HN: Where does everyone go after mass layoffs?
Plenty of jobs out there, but people who get laid off may have to scale back their expectations and demands. One day you get to work on your passion project, get free meals and pet care, work from home, code in your favorite language and framework. A month or two later you start looking seriously at the boring jobs and unsexy workplaces.<p>I was in multimedia and online marketing in 2001, then the bubble burst and the company I worked at laid a bunch of people off. Lots of people I had worked with before got laid off from their jobs too. Companies went out of business. I went back to where my career started, in enterprise logistics, Oracle and Java. Good pay but not sexy or fun, no free meals or work from home. I felt bad for some of the younger and less experienced people I got laid off with, they didn&#x27;t have the domain experience or network of contacts I had -- they had fallen backwards into cool high-paying jobs out of school when money was pouring into anything internet. One junior programmer had to sell his Ducati, get a bus pass, and ended up in retail at Borders.<p>The job market can accommodate a lot of people with tech skills, but many people who just got laid off, or will as the belt-tightening continues, will face a kind of culture shock. They got to work at Disneyland for a while, but now the options will look more like <i>Office Space</i>.