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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

The reason the 2008 recession didn’t impact Silicon Valley very much is because tech was still struggling to come back from the devastation of the dot com bust. In 2002, I recall there being 50% office vacancy in the valley in some areas. It was scorched earth.

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As a former tech recruiter, I can say that March of 2009 was not a pretty time to be looking for work. A lot of people got the axe, and developer supply outstripped demand for a time. I remember posting one ad on craigslist for a Sr. Software Engineer for a seed stage startup in Mountain View and getting 66 applications within a very short period of time, and the candidates were mostly pretty good. Getting that many qualified candidates was very unusual at that time.

Yeah, I was thinking about moving on around then and I held off for about another 9 months because it just didn't feel like a great time to play my best job leads. Maybe things would have been fine but it seemed like a good time to stay put until things stabilized a bit.

I have my own anecdotes, but maybe some one here knows more...

Is the tech stack in Silicon Valley that's used by the most recession vulnerable companies wildly different from what "boring" companies are using?

I see C#/Java and SQL used a lot at companies that are not trying to change the world. Is there going to be a great big skills mismatch?

I'm not sure. I would expect that mature, older companies would be using less exotic tech on average: PHP, Java, C#, etc. Newer companies would be more likely to be using something more niche I think. It newer companies are more volatile, it may be that when funding dries up, the new company folks may have less tech overlap with the mature, older companies. I suspect this would have been more of an issue in 2009 and 2020. It felt like it was much more common to ask developers to be full stack specialists a decade ago. These days most jobs seems to expect one to know multiple languages regardless of what you're doing. Keep in mind 10 years ago I was a recruiter, and now I'm a developer, so my perspective then & now use different lenses.

I don’t know about SV/SF as a whole, but I work for a company that’s not trying to change the world, and our stack is primarily Python. There’s some Java and even some PHP floating around, but I’ve never had to touch anything that wasn’t Python.

The furniture auctions were insane. Aeron chairs everywhere.

San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood was actually quiet. Barely any traffic. Imagine that.

There have been some good arguments that when the downturn hits, it’ll be less of an exciting and satisfying bubble pop ;P, and more like a slow burn.

http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html

Late 90's, early 2000's were an insane time. I remember working at a startup that raised 25 mil, barely had a working product, no actual customers in production. They spent about 3 million upgrading office space, including fancy furniture like Aeron chairs. The company was valued at near 100 million. This was an early SaaS company, referred to then as an "application service provider" (ASP.) About 3 years later the company was "sold" for less than the cost of that office space renovation. Common stock holders got zero. Fortunately I only bought a small fraction of my options when I left.

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