Coping with IT Layoffs: Families and Companies

"We see the finish line in December before we have to dive into personal savings," says the unemployed, 39-year-old father of three. "It can turn into a tense talk between us for a couple of hours."

For the last 15 years, Erickson had steady work as an IT consultant, most recently at Lucrum in Cincinnati, Ohio. But like a lot of people, he became yet another statistic when his company laid him off--on Halloween, no less--because of the slumping economy.

With belt-tightening now the order of the day, the IT industry so far has lost more than 140,000 jobs this year, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas. That's more than the total for all of 2007--and does not even include the nearly 20,000 people who have received pink slips since the start of the fourth quarter.

"We're still in a state of overreaction. It probably will stay that way for another couple months," said Chad Moore, founder and president of Xonicwave, an IT consultancy in San Diego. He does not expect a thaw until the January-to-March time frame at the earliest. Moore says that his clients are grappling with a big unknown and that everybody's gotten too scared to make a move.

"Probably a good 25 percent (of our clients) are still not accepting of things," he said. "Another 50 percent are simply shell-shocked, asking what the hell to do and how to deal with it. The other 25 percent is slowly migrating to the fact that not only do we have to weather the storm, but we have to come out of it with both guns blazing."