A lot of shaking off of weak developers. I don't say that to insult the very talented developers during that time who couldn't stay employed. Rather, they suffered along with the rest, due to way too much supply. Developers who knew one language who could get hired merely by having a word or two on their resume and having a pulse; when things dried up, everyone who should have been an entry level sales person were all clammering to get the jobs and money they were used to, but it was a buyer's market at that point.
You made it through by being versatile. Not by starting to learn while you were job hunting, but being prepared when jobs were aplenty.
You had to be ready to be employed in a non-VC funded world, doing boring things.
I liken it to today, where you have an abundance of 6-week boot camps and developers writing code against the sexy Javascript framework du jour. Those developers will starve if we hit another period where VC dries up.
Learn some boring stuff, even stuff that gets laughed at on HN. .NET. Java. In places like Houston, there's TONS of jobs, but they're not in Rails or Clojure or Angular. They're in .NET, writing apps for big oil or healthcare.
Though it wasn't as big then, I think learning dev-ops will really take someone far when no one's writing Twitter aggregators or social networks for quadcopters.
tl;dr When times are lean, boring languages in boring companies that make real, not VC, money is how you stay afloat
You made it through by being versatile. Not by starting to learn while you were job hunting, but being prepared when jobs were aplenty.
You had to be ready to be employed in a non-VC funded world, doing boring things.
I liken it to today, where you have an abundance of 6-week boot camps and developers writing code against the sexy Javascript framework du jour. Those developers will starve if we hit another period where VC dries up.
Learn some boring stuff, even stuff that gets laughed at on HN. .NET. Java. In places like Houston, there's TONS of jobs, but they're not in Rails or Clojure or Angular. They're in .NET, writing apps for big oil or healthcare.
Though it wasn't as big then, I think learning dev-ops will really take someone far when no one's writing Twitter aggregators or social networks for quadcopters.
tl;dr When times are lean, boring languages in boring companies that make real, not VC, money is how you stay afloat