Also, often in 2001 companies were closing rather than laying off percentages. Or do they count those as layoffs anyway?

_If_ you trust the stats, it supposedly does - it says it counts:

employees laid off (or lose their jobs due to Tech companies going out of business)

Did they have rounds of layoffs first before closing down? Because this may just be the beginning. The fed rates generally take 9-12 months to hit the real economy. We're going to be feeling this for a while.

They did.

But I still feel this is different. In 2001, there were _loads_ of companies that were started in the mid-late 90s on internet hype, and either had literally no business model apart from ‘drive up engagement and we’ll work it out later’, or had a business model (‘deliver pet food quickly’) that just wasn’t working, and growth charts that should it wouldn’t in the foreseeable future.

They’d all been just hemorrhaging cash for years. Is that as widespread now?

This feels more like an established industry that’s taking the (perhaps ill advised) opportunity to make itself more (on paper, at least) efficient to me.

SV jobs were all over the place in mid 2001. After 9/11, they were gone. Took me 9mos to find a gig after that. It sucked

Yeah, agreed. When I started working in the fall - at a company that didn’t have layoffs, at a job I was offered in the spring - there were layoffs and closures happening at other places all around me and I remember feeling sort of guilty about it.