Same thing happened in 2008. This is also the reason shares of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple have steadily gone up the last couple of months. When things are tough, smaller companies (i.e. their competition) won't be able to survive, and they'll snap up their talent for pennies.

The ability to hire is a minuscule part of why these stocks do well in a downturn. The cash flow to weather the storm, entrenched positions, monopoly or near monopoly positions in their markets are all much higher on the list than picking up engineers who were applying to them for the high salary anyway.