> Crashes make companies a lot more selective, just as bubbles make them hire any warm body who can possibly even theoretically write code.

I think they also took it as an excuse to suck even more at interviewing. Since the pile of applicants was practically endless, you could reject people for any damn reason, and nobody would call you on it. At one point somebody was telling me that their standard interview question was "draw me a house." And if they picked up the pen without asking follow-up questions, that was a no-hire. I think that was also around the time the manhole-cover questions started taking off.