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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Pre-2008 financial crisis we didn't have the iPhone, no app stores, cloud hadn't truly taken off, and my graduating class of 4000 students had only 30 computer science majors. The 2010's were such a golden age for software developers in terms of salaries, employers bending over backwards, never ending funding, etc. etc. Many young tech workers are "children of the summer" and never known any dark days. Although this will be painful, it will also teach people a lot of lessons. A lot of weaker talent, sketchy business models, and fast money investors are going to wash out and the industry will emerge stronger.

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> A lot of weaker talent, sketchy business models, and fast money investors are going to wash out and the industry will emerge stronger.

Sounds like 2002. (In other words, been there, done that, got through it by working for "boring" companies)

In 2002 I realized that I wasn’t the hotshot I thought I was. I bet a lot of people will learn that soon too.

For sure. I really worry about the one-trick ponies that know one front-end framework and have had no shortage of opportunities. (In the early 2000s, I knew a lot of ColdFusion devs who honestly weren't cut out to be programmers, but the ease of the language enabled them to earn king's ransoms ... until the jobs dried up and it became a buyer's market)

Funnily enough, the shop I am in uses Coldfusion and Python, but CF is used on the more important, heavily trafficked apps.

Do you remember the guy teaching AOL server and placing them in jobs?

https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.ht...

After the dotcom bust, people with cash seemed to turn to real estate, but I don’t think that is an option this turn. The real of ‘physical’ is a liability.

Fond memories. My first pure software development job was using that stack at USU circa 2005.

To be fair, Phil Greenspun also ran photo.net and produced a absolutely beautiful coffee-table book along the way.

>> Suppose you're running Perl CGI scripts on Apache. Would AOLserver run 10 times faster? Sure. On the other hand, www.cisco.com manages to sell $1 billion in merchandise annually with Perl CGI scripts. It is always easier and safer to plug in more processor boards than to switch tools.

Things haven't changed.

Don't get me wrong, I think CF is a great language. (I've spoken at CF conferences and run CFUGs) I would just always have options :-)

It will be an unpleasant surprise on a lot of levels, ranging from the big - job opportunities, salaries - to the small. One of the things that happened both in 2002 and 2008/2009 was a sudden swing back to demands for suits, ties, and so on. There are a lot of people who resent their staff flexiworking, wearing jeans, and generally acting like it's not 1962 any more.

Well, the difference I see this time is the need for physical separation, so remote work can be a bit more casual dress-wise.

Shirt and tie sales take off, pants free-fall.

Management can’t stand I have a car park at the elevator like them yet wear T-shirts and hoodies and saunter in at 11am. Those benefits are probably not long for this world, but I do enjoy them while I have them.

>> There are a lot of people who resent their staff flexiworking

But that demographic is more at risk of dying from covid-19. The irony is that they are more protected by everyone working from home and that their younger colleagues will have more career opportunities if everyone comes into the office and spreads it.

Gasp.

People hating non-customer facing staff dressing like it's the weekend isn't rational; what makes you think irrational behaviours are isolated?

Perhaps a more charitable explanation is that as the labour market becomes more of a buyers' than a sellers' market, the buyers can afford to be a bit pickier. All other things being equal, we all want a vendor to do things our way: show up on our schedule, meet our standards for look & message (would you be keen on an air conditioner repairman who shows up in swim trunks and hiking boots, or one with a vile political message on his t-shirt?). When it's a sellers' market (say, there's only a single repairman in town) we can't be picky; when the positions are reversed, we can.

Could not agree more. Folks who landed in the job market as star CS majors 5-10 years ago are not ready for that. High salaries, large amounts of funding, massive commercial rent level in San Francisco. This is going to be hard. But as you say a lot of great, lean companies will emerge.

Not just leaner. I predict (fear) extended social isolation will change the nature of work for many employers. Many jobs will be eliminated outright.

Analogy: There was a bank employee who gamed some account resolution process to steal small amounts of money every transaction. But it required him to manually restart the transaction(s), say every three days. Never taking time off, everyone admired his work ethic. Once he finally took a vacation, the whole house of cards fell down and he got busted.

Riffing on David Graeber's bullshit jobs thesis, I think this isolation, more than prior economic recessions, will highlight a lot "make work" that really didn't need doing. All that silly data processing which had no value add. So when the economy restarts, maybe those positions and tasks won't even be missed, and will be eliminated.

True, though there is still a long way to go for software to automate all the various industries. I work in the financial sector where everything is dematerialised, numbers and contracts, and there is still a humongous number of processes that are run manually off excel. I can only imagine how things are in less virtual sectors of the economy.

I am worried for all the e-scooter companies. Already bad unit-economics combined with an almost complete dry up of customers looks bad.

All the food delivery guys should have a breeze, so. If they can keep logistics up and running.

Yep. I got into this field for the money. If there’s no more money I’ll leave. Already trying to figure out the next move.

There is still money, it's just at large companies now. They're not desperate though, and I'm sure they'll keep the difficult interview processes during the downturn.

This is a field that will test that again and again. The way I look at it is we all sacrifice our well-being and free time to get ahead in this industry and get conditioned to believe self-neglect and selflessness equals more money. Generally, a point of diminishing returns approaches and that's when to make a decision. When the market goes south many more people become willing to work for less and do without just to stay employed. The market never readjusts after these shifts usually it takes a transformative technology like mobile, cloud, or new infrastructure to lift itself back up again. This in turn requires more education or learning skills and starting over again. The next move should be learning what's "next" and if you do that things will probably be mostly OK. It's a gamble but if you believe in yourself invest in yourself and don't fall into the trap of using those same skills working a lot more for a lot less. Instead of throwing the towel in consider charting that course to a better place.

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