I personally don't see this myself. I work for a profitable startup in SF and we've had a hell of a time finding good hires. The problem may be that we do PHP development and the market is saturated with ex-lifers who are Java and .NET aficionados. I know a handful of other startups feel the same way.
I'm inclined to believe that no matter _how_ bad the economy gets, it's _always_ difficult to find truly good hires. The kind of people that you want are going to be the last people to lose their jobs in times like these; on the contrary, they're going to be kept around and worked overtime as a mechanism for reducing costs.
but they usually find jobs right away. Like within a month or two, if not, they just start their own project/startup.
I know this for a fact/personal anecdotal evidence.
It seems that this downturn is hitting more the general work force, and people that do more 'soft' type of work: managers, marketing, pr, etc.
If you are a hard core engineer, you shouldn't have trouble finding a job.
The exception will be people that just came out of college, or with less than two years of experience. It seems that right now companies are hiring more experienced/hit the ground running, engineers.
During boom times, when they can't find these kind of engineers, they will hire less experienced ones, and be willing to train them and become productive.
Weird... actually (from my limited experience) Java development is more similar to PHP than .Net, so the original comment actually makes sense. It seems like downmodding comments became a lot more common in HN recently. Not a good sign.
