Tech layoffs are traumatizing young workers. Elderly? not much.

“Here’s a gift,” said Mr. Pulliam. “I don’t think this story gets told. It’s always gloomy and gloomy.”

But for tech workers experiencing their first economic downturn, the cuts were eye-opening. Ms. Zhang studied product design in college with an eye on joining a technology industry that seemed to be stagnating. Getting a layoff from Lyft shook that belief.

Erin Sumner, software recruiter at Facebook parent company Meta, used to brag to potential hires that the company was the fastest ever to be valued at $1 trillion. She said she would tout the company’s strengths, even in the past year as its share price fell and its core business, digital advertising, struggled.

When rumors of layoffs began circulating last year, she assured her colleagues that their jobs were safe, pointing to the more than $40 billion in cash the company had in the bank. But in November she was among 11,000 workers laid off.

“It was very traumatic,” said Ms. Sumner, 32. And she managed to find a new job as the chief recruiter for a startup called DeleteMe, which aims to remove customer information from search results. But she said she cringes every time she reads about more layoffs in tech.

“I’m afraid it will get worse before it gets better,” said Mrs. Sumner. “There is no guarantee. I was laid off by the safest company in the world.”

A similar reversal of fortune has challenged companies that sell software services. Shares of Salesforce, the industry leader, fell about 50 percent last year as its sales growth slowed. The company has bragged during the pandemic, spending $28 billion to buy Slack Technologies. It swelled to 80,000 employees from 49,000 in two years.

During a plenary meeting last week to discuss the company’s decision to lay off 10 percent of its workers, Marc Benioff, the company’s CEO, tried to empathize with his dissatisfied employees by contextualizing the cuts.