>"We just happened to be under one of the few umbrellas in a storm."
It's not different there. It never is.
Further, an umbrella (sorry to extend a potentially leaky abstraction here) doesn't mean that you are immune to the storm. It just means that you deflect most of the rain around you.
But it's different for IT, much different. I was let go from multiple contracts, but the time I spent out of work was by choice, and I had two interviews a week the moment I put my resume out while friends in other sectors would have killed for even an interview. I was able to choose the job I wanted once I was willing to move out of my home city.
I don't have a star studded resume either, and I've seen mediocre and worse developers stay on because replacements couldn't be found.
It's different for IT, and programmers more specifically.
What the slide deck didn't account for is that there was nowhere for big money to put their money - everything was in trouble. So, people started to look for new opportunities, and Silicon Valley suddenly looked mighty attractive as a place for investment.
On Main Street, there are people who have been out of work for years now. It really was that bad, is that bad. We just happened to be under one of the few umbrellas in a storm.