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<p>Every industry gets nailed at some point or another. Aerospace and defense got hammered in the 90’s when the defense budget was slashed.</p>
<p>The 2002 CS job market was the worst one I’ve seen in 30 years. Between 2001 and 2004, my hourly rate went from $115/hr to $75/hr to $65/hr. You’d read stories about programmers who were working at companies for no salary, just so they’d have something on their resume.</p>
<p>Lots of Americans, green card holders, and highly-paid H-1Bs got laid off, and were replaced with low-paid H-1Bs. There was also a huge wave of jobs that were offshored. Many programmers left the industry and never came back. (Lots of them went into real estate, and when the mortage crisis hit in 2008, they couldn’t get back into high-tech.)</p>
<p>Things seemed to start recovering around 2005.</p>