Any of you guys in SV get a sense that that area is headed south along with the rest of the economy... or not? I recall moving back to the bay area in 2002, and it was pretty bad. I found work, but it was kind of difficult to connect to potential employers as there were a lot of .com people still milling about, looking for something to do.
I know that Yahoo just fired 1000 people in the past few weeks, but I hear that many of them got a 3 months severance. That should be enough time for them to start a business or find another gig.
Friend was a laser engineer, just got laid off after 25 years, but had 5 offers on the table in two weeks.
Even the "big names" out here that are VC funded web startups, that would be at risk of taking a one way to the dead pool in the event of a "bubble pop", don't really have that many employees. Digg has 50 employees, Facebook had 300 at my last count but is still hiring like crazy: http://www.facebook.com/jobs/
It seems like there are a lot of companies that are coming and going, but there aren't the huge layoffs that hit the place so hard 6-7 years ago, because web startups have kept it pretty lean and mean. For the most part, the engineers still seem to be running the valley, not the biz dev guys.
Startups have been built without a lot of money, and are used to running on a shoe string. If the economy tightens up, I don't think that it will the startup guys that hard.
Some of the big hardware companies might shed some people if capital expenditures take a nose dive across the country, so that means that Intel, HP and Sun might shed some employees. But that's about it.
