Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

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Will briefly share my story, then offer advice:

I was VP Tech at a high profile ad driven startup. We raised $50M (Softbank money in those days). Spent a lot of it scaling up on Sun hardware, ran TV ads, saw tremendous response, then a week later the bottom in the ads business model dropped out. Literally a week later. Amazing.

We went from close to 300 staff in March (60 of which reported to me) to 7 in October. The CEO handled the layoffs.

Most of the developers who reported to me took months to find new jobs.

Many of the non-tech people who had found unique jobs in our business were not able to find similar work again and went to business school or law school.

I had worked day and night to scale up, then worked day and night to scale down. I burned out. I moved, stopped working for pay, lived on savings, went to grad school (in CS) for a while, then finally got back on the horse in 2005.

Some advice- worrying about the next bubble bursting is a distraction, like following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question, but the right plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and whether there is a bubble or not is kind of irrelevant.

You might lose your job in the midst of major investment, or you might weather repeated rounds of layoffs. Random things will happen uniquely to YOU. They have to all of us.

The average story is helpful context but it is not your story. Protect and defend yourself. You are the only one who can.

I would emphasize this: worrying about the next bubble bursting is a distraction, like following the shiny. It is good you are asking the question, but the right plan to be making- a career plan- is what is important, and whether there is a bubble or not is kind of irrelevant.

Internalizing that can be the best thing any developer does. It is way more impressive to talk about all the skills you have acquired in your career in an interview than it is to talk about how your last company crashed and burned and you rode it right into the ground.

Make your plans for how you want to advance your career, what you want to learn, what field you want to work in, the companies that are places where you could pick up relevant skills. And plan for things you could do in the down time between jobs.

Interestingly this is also the attitude of many money managers (Warren Buffett, to take the best known example). You'd think at least they would take explicit, timed preventive action. Many (most?) of them don't.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say about Buffett, but he's sitting on a gigantic pile of cash right now. He knows which way the wind is blowing.

Not sure this is a result of crash planning, or that good deals are hard to find at the top and he won't pony up unless it's a good deal.

Which is exactly what I'm doing as a freelancer as well.

> and went to business school or law school.

Familiar sounding story. I've got lots of friends who took it as an opportunity (or were forced by it) to switch out of tech careers. Lots of people I know went and became things like paramedics (at least three I can think of), nurses, doctors, lawyers. A bunch were well enough off to be able to reinvent themselves creatively as photographers, musicians, DJs, producers.

(I'm from Sydney, so it didn't hit anything like as hard here, I was at what would these days be called a startup in the online travel industry. We'd hit $1mil in turnover @~32% margins in Jan and had an offer on the table which my would have turned my ~5% equity into a quite nice house paid for outright if we'd taken it. Then when Sept 11 happened we lost 90% of our US customer revenue over night (which was by far the bulk of our customers). Didn't _kill_ us outright, but it took us ~2 years to recover back to our next $1m month. We struggled on for another half dozen years before selling the business to a competitor, and I eventually spent my entire share proceeds from that sale taking a handful of friends out to a (very nice) dinner.)

Idk I graduated into the Great Recession and ignored it at first. Undergrad just didn’t prepare me for professional planning nor woke me up to the relevant market pressures. I’d say it’s important to know what’s going on in the market to inform both things like immediate savings priorities, but also medium term choices and direction. For example, I knew my programming chops could be honed into marketable skill, but I didn’t foresee my math BS becoming as relevant to highly valuable jobs like it has.

I definitely wouldn’t have moved somewhere the economy depended so greatly on luxury goods and services, for instance. It was hit really hard by the GR.

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