A lot of people are responding with historical examples of qualified people unable to find jobs, but I think that strengthens my point. If you can do aircraft stress analysis, you're qualified to do a whole host of technical jobs with very little retraining; it's just a matter of finding those who are willing to take a chance. You don't have to wait for another stress analysis job.
No, your point is flawed and has no basis in reality. If many (read 10k-1000k order of magnitude depending on location size) skilled engineers are fired at the same time then things get really bad for engineers.
* All the companies than need any engineering based work done can take their pick of the best.
* But remember their normal recruitment channels are still open and feeding potential employees through. They may prefer to hire fresh talent rather than a 50 year old.
* And other engineering companies will be affected. If your aircraft company lays off 30% of its employees then it probably does so because it has less orders on its books. Therefore the smaller companies making parts for the aerospace industry have less orders and will be firing rather than hiring.
* Even worse large job losses tend to be correlated with a generalised or sector wide downturn. So car companies and ship companies and bridge companies may also be in a situation where there is less demand and be firing rather than hiring.
* The local economies of the places where the engineers were fired from will be affected. Skilled workers tend to support several service workers and when the skilled workers are laid off the service sectors are affected (you don't go out to a restaurant or get your house done up if you've just lost your job).
* If people move away from towns/cities due to lost work then the property prices tend to fall. A family with a mortgage may be (or feel that they are) better off holding onto their home and accepting much lower pay than accepting they have lost several $100,000 on the re-sale price of their home.
That was only obvious in retrospect, and has very strong survivor-bias: it might as well have sunk the company, and IBM would have been completely unknown today.
Also, things are a bit different today: IBM is largely a services company, which doesn't lend itself well to inventory building. Also, they have struggled on the merit of their offerings, not the economical climate, for a very long time. Doubling down right now is not obvisouly going to end well.
Recovery from the Depression in the USA started in the mid-late thirties. Are you saying IBM sold computers at that time?
Just a matter of terminology here. I would probably not classify IBM's business machines as computers until the 1950's.
"Computers" were actually clerks in the census office that spent their days manually adding up and multiplying things. They got replaced by IBM's tabulators well before the 30's. But you are right IBM's inventory at the time was mostly tabulators.
Maybe I'm not being clear: restricting yourself to "engineering" jobs is far too narrow in the first place: it's technically harder than a lot of middle class jobs, and, in the worst case, engineers should be able to market themselves for jobs like actuary, accountant, analyst, etc. The whole problem is thinking that you can only work at jobs designated "engineering".
Disclaimer: this doesn't mean I'm better at the job search. I'm definitely not, and I'd be in the exact same position, of working bad jobs or mooching because I can't land anything between grocery store cashier and engineer. And a big part of the problem is thinking that e.g. someone capable of doing all the math involved in engineering "can't possibly" do the work of an accountant.
Yes the engineer can be an accountant but s/he needs to find someone to actually hire her/him. (I suspect you are in agreement on this point.)
If the economy is down then companies don't hire many accountants, actuaries or analysts for the same reasons as they don't hire as many engineers. They also cut down on sales, management and most white collar jobs (and blue collar). So the hypothetical engineer is competing with experienced people for too few of these jobs as well. Similarly many companies prefer to hire recent graduates in these roles for the same reasons as with engineers.
Many middle class jobs also have a qualification based barrier to entry (e.g. from your list accountants and actuaries in the UK+) that makes a career change difficult in good times let alone bad.
+ the training for both of these is usually on the job but why would you hire an ex-engineer you need to train in a job market where excellent skilled hires and fresh young graduates are plentiful.
Examples of qualified people unable to find jobs are evidence that it's easy for qualified people to find jobs? You're going to have to explain this to me.
