Tech layoffs shock young workers. Old people ? Not really.

Recent job cuts in industry have been a wake up call for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.

When Lyft laid off 13% of its employees in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company.< /p>

"It seemed like technology companies had so many opportunities," said Ms. Chang, 26. "If you got a job, you did it. It was a sustainable path."

Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that the crypto exchange Coinbase was cutting his job. Since the 48-year-old engineer was fired from his first job at video game company Atari in 2003, he says, he asks himself once a year, "If I fired, what would I do?"< /p>

The contrast between Ms Chang's and Mr Pulliam's reactions to their career disappointments testifies to a generation gap that is becoming increasingly clear as the tech industry, which has grown rapidly during the pandemic, swings toward mass layoffs.

Microsoft announced this week that "it planned to cut 10,000 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce. And on Friday morning, Google's parent company, Alphabet, said it planned to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its total. Their cuts followed major layoffs at other tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Salesforce.

Millennials and Gen Z, born between 1981 and 2012, began their career in tech for a decade of expansion as jobs multiplied as fast as iPhone sales. The companies they joined conquered the world and challenged economic rules. And when they went to work in outfits that offered bus rides to the office and amenities like free food and laundry, they weren't just taking on a new job — they were embracing a lifestyle. Few of them had experienced mass layoffs.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X, born between 1946 and 1980, on the other hand, experienced the most strong contraction of the industry already seen. The internet crash of the early 2000s eliminated more than a million jobs, emptying Silicon Valley's 101 freeway of commuters as many businesses closed overnight.

"It was a bloodbath, and it went on for years," said Jason DeMorrow, a software engineer who was laid off twice in 18 months and out of a job for more than six months." As concerning as the current downturn is, and while I understand those affected, there is no comparison."

The generational divide in technology is representative of a larger phenomenon. A person's year of birth has a big influence on opinions about work and money. According to a 2011 study by economists Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California at Berkeley and Stefan Nagel of the University of Chicago, early personal experiences determined nt strongly a person's appetite for financial risk.

The study, which analyzed the Federal Reserve's survey of consumer finances from 1960 in 2007 found that people who reached adulthood in the 1970s, when the stock market was stagnant, were reluctant to invest in the early 1980s, when it roared. This trend reversed in the 1990s.

"Once you encounter your first crash , things are changing,” the professor said Nagel. "You realize bad things are happening and maybe you should be a little more careful."

For Gen X, the dot-com collapse has hit early in career. From 2001 to 2005, the technology sector laid off a quarter of its workers, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by CompTIA, a technology education and research organization.

The layoffs that swept the industry were worse than recess...