&gt; Would you say that the market for software developers after the first dotcom implosion was merely saturated<p>Yes, I sure would.<p>&gt; all the out of work devs had chosen careers poorly, joining a saturated market?<p>I would, although obviously only of the devs who had decided on the job after the crash (given how short it was, this applies to very few).  Tenured professorship, on the other hand, has been in decline for a long time and clearly not a good financial choice for close to a decade, if not longer.