I was working on a web hosting startup in 2001 in Latin America, I was 18. I liked the job and they gave me a lot of freedom regarding also going to college, but it's not that I was not looking for something better. Honestly until 2003 none of my friends and community switched jobs, not a single one of them.
Things only started taking off again when the "mobile" thing started with the cellphones revolution In my experience until that started, the job market was difficult. Not impossible, just difficult.
2008? Not much. Some hiring freezes, maybe some salary freezes, but overall quite reduced impact. Of course, this is very location dependent and domain dependent.
New grads were probably hit the hardest, as they usually are during recessions.
2000 was much worse from everything I hear, but I wasn't there at the time.
Yes, 2000/2001 was much worse generally in tech. I was pretty lucky. Was laid off but got another job through a good connection with a company still doing OK. Then not so OK but aside from a salary cut made it through.
But there was a lot of "Would you like fries with that?" in the tech sector generally.
Just want to understand what to look out for and just prepare.