[UnBlinkingEye]

I'm an unemployed high tech worker...

As am I and as are hundreds of thousands of others. If we had formed unions and fought H1-B and didn't fall for phony stock options we might not be unemployed.

[discostu]

You almost got it right. The phony stock options played in. The real problem is we (I'm tech too, though I managed to land another job) were riding a wave. And we forgot the one rule every surfer knows: all waves crash eventually. One quick look at the dot-com waste land shows we made our own bed. Tons of businesses were being formed that had no prayer of revenue period, much less self sustaining revenue. We were all cracking wise about how amazon.com hadn't shown a profit yet and none of us were wondering what that meant about our company (as it turns out amazon pulled it off, they're actually in the black, how and why I still haven't figured out). The seeds to our destruction were in our overconfidence and the blind eye we turned to the reality of the business world. We declared this a new economy and said the old rules didn't apply, and we were full of crap.