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Comment by bdrool | Hacker News Reader

If the intended insinuation of this essay is that somehow there aren't a bunch of seriously over-valued companies out there, or that there isn't a long-overdue downturn on the way, then I'm afraid I can't bring myself to agree.

People young enough to have never been through a downturn in their professional career are usually in denial right up until the moment it happens. And the people who try to call the bubble early, as funny as it may be to make fun of them as is being done here, are usually the ones who have been through it before, see it coming early, and try to warn everyone, even though no one ever listens (too busy enjoying the party!)

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>And the people who try to call the bubble early, as funny as it may be to make fun of them as is being done here, are usually the ones who have been through it before, see it coming early, and try to warn everyone, even though no one ever listens (too busy enjoying the party!)

First, someone is always "calling the bubble". At the bottom of the housing market there were people screaming that it was going to keep dropping. People have been calling the tech market a bubble for literally decades. And conversely, there are always people claiming that we're nowhere near the top, even when we are. It's not useful to listen because the reality is that no one really knows. If you think we're the top of a bubble, then cash out and be happy with your superiority.

Second, what are you, as an employee, going to do if you think the tech bubble is going to pop? Sure, you should be saving, but you should do that anyway. You shouldn't be over invested in tech, but that's also always true. What meaningful steps should you take if you believe a tech bubble is about to pop that you should not take anyway?

Isn't it common in SV to accept jobs paying lower than market value in exchange for equity? Presumably, if one thinks the bubble is about to pop, they should avoid those jobs in detriment to offers from "safer" big companies.

I think this is probably in the list of "think you (shouldn't) do anyway". If you're a normal employee with a small amount of equity, the reality is that you are overwhelmingly likely to not cash in big even in the event of a successful exit. If you're being paid in large part with equity, then you're probably being underpaid, not a great decision in any market.

But you're right that knowing a bubble is about to pop might certainly dissuade many people from entering this kind of risky, lopsided employment deal.

That's what happened to me. I got into a very good position in my career.. and then it crashed. I'm more skilled than I've ever been, but finding work that matches my (broad) skillset is almost impossible because I'm either over qualified, or the job is far too specific. It's very strange to experience, so I've been working on freelance work for the past 6 months now.

Year-ago-me wouldn't have believed it. Bubbles suck, and the current tech industry reminds me of my own experiences - Pop.

May I ask what your particular bubble was?

Sure - I work mostly in finance with linux/devops/app support/programming experience. I becm senior linux admin position by the time I was 27 after some very interesting work at some HFT companies. Low latency tuning, monitoring, resolved many outages, etc. At one point, the owner of an HFT company came up to me and asked me to fix the latency issues that were causing the company to fail, which I did in a couple days. Problem was, I never really got any chance to learn the core linux tools like bind, etc since they weren't really ever relevant. So, when I got a position at a traditional linux shop without knowing the core utilities, I was viewed as completely inexperienced and nobody really took me seriously. It was very strange to go from being treated as a rockstar generalist to go to the opposite. The company decided my experience wasn't really valid and moved me from the linux team to the devops team after I did a user audit for a subpoena by FINRA really, really well well. That role ended up just meaning "troubleshoot why X trader's trade didn't receive Y price." all day, which wasn't what I was hired to do. Instead of doing that, I wrote a bunch of tools to interface with the infrastructure. Emails explaining the tools were entirely ignored and even made fun of, so I left. On my last day, I demoed a tool I wrote that dynamically built json output for all application environments which was loved, despite it being ignored 10 times in the past. Lesson there was that presentation is often significantly more important than the work itself.

When I tried to get a new position later on, everybody was expecting cloud and web development experience, which is experience I don't have. Insistence that it was within reason to learn cloud utilities never worked, even with experience building tools to build vmware instances in bulk. For the positions that I was qualified for, I found myself having more knowledge than the interviewers, so I gave off an unintentional arrogant vibe. For example for a job I was really interested in, I got dinged for my answer to the question, "How do you print all open sockets?" for answering "lsof -i". Apparently netstat was the only acceptable answer. That sort of thing happens all the time, and interviewers do NOT like to be corrected - the number of senior admins who don't know how file handles work is asinine.

It got very, very tiring very quickly and I just kind of gave up. I'm now working in building up investigative journalist and data analysis experience to get out of the linux field. It's going pretty well, but there's little money in it so far. If that doesn't work, a few interesting positions in infrastructure security are in the pipe.

</rant>

Thanks for the answer! Interesting to hear what you're doing now, as it's something I've been eyeing myself. Aside from money, do you find interesting opportunities/problems to look into?

(one recent little example of what made me think of this was the scene in the documentary Spotlight where the journalist analyze volumes of data on priests' assignments and whatnot - all by hand. I couldn't help but think it'd be so much easier to OCR the pages and analyze the data with some basic scripting.)

Yep, I'm doing a ton of things right. It's really enjoyable and I highly recommend it. :)

Just to name some..

-Working on the IT infrastructure and one of the 5 or so founders of a 160p LAN party.

-Data analysis of Chicago parking tickets: https://plot.ly/~red-bin/6.embed

-Sued the mayor of Chicago for his phone records and won. Still working on it, but I met up with a journalist to discuss last Monday.

-Doing HFT systems tuning as freelance (pays the bills, too).

-Submitted a major infrastructure bug to comcast. Talked to their CISO and everything.

-Did the same for Northwestern, but with less followthrough.

-Learned a bit of R, significantly improved my python, did a bunch of random silly projects.

-Made a proof of concept for a domestic violence shelter finder for a hackathon. Just handed off the code to a few junior coders to ride with.

-Made a minecraft 3d printer print a png mural by pulling from github in-game. Limited myself to only using textures in the game without color transformations. Became a really hard problem, since the 'pixels' used by the printer don't move. Learned more than I'd thought from that project.

..It's fun. :)

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