The dotcom bust was bad for the software and computer industry (and, yeah, it was definitely brutal) but didn't affect the larger economy all that much. Take a look at the list of recessions in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...) and you can see it was relatively mild by the numbers.

This time, it's global and nearly every sector is affected; there won't be a place to hide. The US is already at unemployment rates not seen since the recessions of the 1920s/1930s and the bleeding hasn't stopped yet.

These unicorn collapses are just the rumble, not the avalanche itself and anybody not terrified right now, darned well should be.

I did. It was tough, not a lot of "interesting" companies, but if you road it out doing government contracting or working at a boring-but-stable financial firm, you were fine.

You could get brick and timber office space for free. Vacancy of 50% in SOMA. Try to imagine that today... we might get there once again.

The dotcom bust was only brutal if you were either working for a non profitable VC backed startup or your profit depended on VC spending. Regular old big enterprise kept chugging along and were still hiring. I was looking for a job in early 2000 as a software developer with three years of experience in Atlanta and there were plenty of companies hiring.