During the dot com boom, the scarcity of developers relative to demand for them was orders of magnitude worse than in, say, 2020. After the bust, there was perhaps not a scarcity, but not much of a surplus the way there is now.
The bubble burst in 2001, it took me 3 months to find another job, and I had to switch my role from a primary development engineer to support/operations roles and I have never recovered my career from that. Based on what I hear, the market today is much worse than that.
