With respect, you're making huge assumptions. What proportion of the increase[1] in unemployment is composed of competent software engineers? How difficult do you think it would be for a decent software engineer to change jobs tomorrow?
If I had to bet, I'd say a fair chunk of those people were involved in construction, one way or another, since the boom was largely in housing and construction is very labour intensive.
My guess is the trend has been to call programmers developers and the relative number of jobs available is roughly the same.
Unless there's some sort of real difference that I haven't found, I don't care if someone calls me a programmer or a developer. I really don't see any difference beside word choice.
If I had to bet, I'd say a fair chunk of those people were involved in construction, one way or another, since the boom was largely in housing and construction is very labour intensive.