Crisis like this is when the chaff is separated from the wheat. They filter out people that shouldn't be in he bussiness.

I remember my car mechanic was a DBA back in 2000. He read a SQL book, and a 3 months class, and bam, he was DBA for some company, which eventually went under. He admited me he didn't know what he was doing, but at the time you will get hired right away if you new something.

He owns a car repair garage now, and is pulling up to 500k of profit a year. Who knows, maybe he would have been a great DBA with enough experience, but in this case he clearly profited more by doing what he was good at.

Kinda like CS 121, which was the hardest class in college, and a lot of people failed. They usually switched majors, to bussiness, or information systems, or something else they could do.

I thought it was good, as those people were evidently there b/c they had heard all those stories about startups and being rich, while had no passion or abilities for programming whatsover.

Besides, even good software teams are now losing people simply because the money is not there, either in financing or for the customers (thereby reducing the customer base). They do not hire -- on the contrary, some have to lay good people off. This is not good. It's the opposite of good.

Even if you're correct, and I'm not saying that you are, so what? Most of the "talent" out there is marginal. Meaning most people laid off will have trouble finding a job. You see this as a good thing?

I don't know, I'd sort of welcome it if it happened. Between savings, severance pay, and my small business I'd be in an excellent position to go full-time, and being laid off would alleviate any social reservations I have about quitting. (Both in the "I promised my bosses I would stay a while to justify their investment in me" and "Salarymen who quit are not likely to be salarymen again" senses.)

This I don't think is true anyway. It has always seemed to me like a socially manufactured platitude to keep people erring as much on the side of safety as they can possibly reach. For the average person, it might be a very reasonable default, which is why the platitude tends to stick.

Otherwise, I don't know if the social reservations are worth worrying so much about. It's hard to tell how much of this is people legitimately looking out for you, and how much is them preemptive prevention from having to envy you and what you did that they couldn't bring themselves to do.

I have a... quirky relationship to these social norms as a foreigner, but that is another topic altogether.

You believe that a layoff could ruin someone's life for years to come. This sounds severely melodramatic even if my hearing it is quite common. If this is your perspective on what would happen if you were laid off at some point, you are probably right. If you believe that you will lose your house, force your kids into a lifestyle of poverty and guarantee no post-secondary education for them, you are probably right again. You are probably right because you will probably make yourself right; either that, or you will count yourself one of the lucky few to survive.

On the other hand, you might find an even better job than the one you had; you may have not even been looking before you were laid-off, and didn't know -- or didn't care that -- you had any other options. A company might find an even better use for your's talents, thus guaranteeing that said talent is not lost forever.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are quite powerful things; they fundamentally change a person's behavior. I don't think a layoff has to be the end of the road. Even if one has a mortgage and kids, it is how you handle these challenges that determines whether or not it was good for you or the industry. You can either grow and learn, or lament and wallow in self-desperation and resignation.

And I have to take on this point about it being no fault of their own in particular, because it has always seemed false to me. If they are put in the position you describe, of being unable to feed their family or keep their home, it is most certainly their responsibility in part. They were not owed that job, and that they lost it is not tragedy. They were not owed anything; they already had little security, as much as they may have convinced themselves of the contrary. That they were in a position to get completely screwed as soon as that job vanished and before they could find another one, that is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy of their own making. They were relying far too much on the security they had supposedly accrued, and too little on keeping themselves in a position to survive misfortune. And I have yet to know someone who is talented being unable to find a job for so long that even with financial preparation they end up broke. Maybe I just know the wrong people, and reality, in an absolute sense, does suck as bad as you go on about.

But I think this is way too sensationalist and melodramatic, and I suspect for that reason my grip on the real reality will be called into question.

As a random aside, I've heard tales on here a few times of people with mortgages and/or children starting companies of their own, taking on a similar amount of potential pain as someone who is laid off (probably more, because there's no UI payments in the mean time). I'm interested in the perspective of these people on this, because if being laid off is the reading of one's eulogy, it sounds like that doing a startup under similar circumstances is like running oneself through with a knife.

People are being laid off in droves (talented as wel as not so talented as well as those who were lucky to have a job) and it hurts them and their families for real.

Not everybody can move to chase the jobs and not everybody has a list of instantly monetizable pet projects on the shelf.

Nor do they have nest eggs. The fat cat bankers that caused this crisis are in a better position than they are and that is sad.

The articles suggestion is very misleading, see above (no point repeating my point in yet another comment) for a more realistic approach to getting out of this mess in one piece.

But the point of the article is to lift spirits where spirits need lifting. Even if the message isn't entirely true, it might prompt some people to be more proactive and do something if a lay off has them feeling depressed or reclusive.