But I had some savings, collected unemployment, and had the help and support of friends (who also worked in tech, and weathered the .com bubble's popping more fortunately than I did) and family.
Not all — if even many — of those things are true for most of the rest of this country.
I mean, seriously: the fact that such a large chunk of the tech workforce couldn't find work in ~2001-3, or whenever, ended up going to law school it became A Thing people noticed doesn't seem to me a particularly valid counter-argument to the economic wreckage that is the Rust Belt.
Yes, it's a wonderful prima facie demonstration of career mobility being a thing that actually exists in the world, but it, specifically, is also largely only available to people who already have the knowledge and skills (to say nothing of connections) such that they're almost necessarily going to be better positioned for these kinds of situations.
Usually I'm the one in these threads arguing the position you're arguing, but I've decided that it's a pretty big waste of time to do so on HN.
It's funny you mentioned that a lot of people moved to law. That industry should make it painfully clear that no one is immune to this. When I was a kid the societal message was "want to make money? Become a lawyer!". Enough kids listened to that message that the industry is in shambles today.
I wonder what's next?
I'm going to avoid the whole blue-collar vs. the economy argument on HN, for once, but I do want to refresh people's memories here: this has happened, in 2000. I lived through it; purely coincidentally I decided to leave the software industry almost exactly the night before the house of cards came down, and the funny thing was that having "programmer" on my resume got me turned down for retail jobs. They assumed I was overqualified and would leave as soon as a software opportunity presented itself. More than one potential employer said as much.
It really sucked and there was a lot of noise made about it on places like Slashdot. If you were an unemployed programmer then, you pretty much gave up after a couple of months and transferred to something entirely different. (Many seemed to move to law.)
Unfortunately the folks that experienced that don't speak up in these threads and everyone else on HN is too young to remember it.