Laid Off? It's Good for You and Good for the Tech Industry

The disconnection between the writer and reality is really striking.<p>If you're laid off it is never 'good for you', and it certainly isn't good for the industry.<p>Plenty of talent that was thrown out at some point in this crisis due to no fault of theirs is not going to try their hand again at a job that left them with 0 security when times were hard, that talent will be lost forever.<p>And if you have a mortgage, kids to put through school or college and the usual family expenses then being laid off is a crisis, not 'good for you' in any way because making a facebook or a twitter application is not going to put bread on your table in time for your house not to be repossessed.<p>It's ok to suggest that for some individuals there are opportunities in being laid off but for the most part any forced leave from a job that you may have liked and performed well in and that kept you alive is a tragedy.<p>It could easily ruin someones life for years to come.

<i>And there are still plenty of opportunities out there for Valley types: Facebook widgets, iPhone apps, Twitter tools, and cloud services are exploding.</i><p>That's where they lost me. Laid off? No money? Kids starving? Make a new Twitter app!

<i>Paul Boutin (paul.boutin@nytimes.com) was a</i> Wired <i>senior editor until we fired him in 2001</i>

I laugh. I'm not exactly laid off, but I quit a pretty decent dev job in January to do some traveling. Since then I built a gmaps mashup for a library, a wordpress twitter widget, a custom wordpress widget, and $80 worth of elance work. I'm in the process of learning python/django in the hopes of releasing a pretty fun twitter app with no revenue potential. I can say of all of the technologies I used to build these things, I had zero previous experience, and still don't have enough to list it on my resume in good conscience. So where does that leave me? My travels are coming to an end and I'm scared to death I'll never find a job.