I think we are in for a tech market correction at some point but I hope it isn't as drastic as the one you paint! Everyone seems so starry eyed in the Bay Area but few seem to remember 2008-2009 when even Google was laying people off. I remember going from being unhappy in my job to being thankful for having one in the span of a few months when pretty much all job postings dried up.
Likewise. I moved to SF right before Lehman, to work at a startup. I had next to no money in the bank when I moved here, and an outrageous rent to pay. It was (financially) terrifying -- but at least it cut back on the douchebaggery in the city!
That said, 2009 wasn't a tech-specific downturn. New York had it far worse than us, and there were still tech companies doing their thing in SF, albeit on a much tighter budget, since the money wasn't flowing. The dot-com crash (which is essentially what I am describing) had its epicenter in SOMA, and we're a lot closer to that scenario than we are to Lehman -- outside of exports (oops, spoke too soon!) and shale oil/gas (oops, spoke too soon!), tech is the primary bright spot in our economy right now. The dumb money is flooding into tech instead of real estate this time, which means that when it does go away, the hangover is going to be pretty wicked.
I got a new job in SV in 2008 as well. People were congratulating me that I managed to get "an" offer. Lots of places had hiring freezes back then. When did things change in the valley? Was it Q4 2010? Q1 2011? I'm genuinely curious and trying to refresh my memory. I feel like I was in a funk and then woke up one day with all this Unicorn talk. Today, housing prices in MV "seem to be" 100% more than what they were in 2010. What the heck happened? Does "Unicorns" explain all of that? Forign investors? Ultra low interest rates??
Q4 2010 feels about right to me -- that's when companies started to hire more aggressively, anyway.
In retrospect, my first "this might be insane" moment happened when techcrunch wrote the "airbnb has arrived" article, announcing that they'd grown a horn and become a unicorn. That was June 2011.
"It was (financially) terrifying -- but at least it cut back on the douchebaggery in the city!"
Don't get it? Personally, I can't find anything positive about spending so much of one's income on rent? If it's crime, my car is still broken into like its 1999?
