I have much more unemployed friends and they stay unemployed longer. Employers have started requiring fluent German.
For me, AI is a bigger threat. It wrecked my prospects as a developer, which was always my fallback if the site failed. Then LLMs and AI overviews started wrecking my traffic. It made me divert a lot of attention away from making the website helpful, towards making it resilient.
I share a similar sentiment about Germany. I mean, we do have a recession for a couple of years already.
As a Software Developer, I've experienced layoffs of International companies just nuking their German team, for both cost and law risks (from people trying to create a worker council and the like).
I'm still employed because of my YOE, my skills & a wide network of people that have seen the quality of my work, but I see even previous CTOs and great engineers without a job.
Maybe in the years ahead, I might need to work doing something else.
I've always wanted to go to trade school and run my own business anyways, just didn't due to software engineering being so fun, interesting, challenging and ofc, well-paid.
I've been practicing my German a lot (C1+), so in worst case scenario I can do other work, maybe become an electrician or something that involves moving atoms, rather than bits.