I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too | Hacker News Reader

I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

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357 pointsloumal306 comments

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic.

And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at <physical job> but hacking all night. Eventually I convinced someone to hire me as a sysadmin and it was game on.

I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth.

Conversely, the (completely respectable and valid) 'I just need a solid way to provide' people get fucked the hardest every time. Cosmic irony.

Maybe there's some real psychology behind it though. Doing something for practical necessity is a weaker motivation than personal obsession. According to the Overjustification Effect, extrinsic rewards harm intrinsic motivation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect).

Meh, who knows. I know some people hiring Python devs in Mexico if anyone is hurting and lives here.

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth.

I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary

Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. When you're just trying to scrape by you won't make take those odds. But if you're passionate you're not thinking about those odds, they're a byproduct of your passion

Prefer opportunism to goal setting

> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

"actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year.

1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66

EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribution.

“actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days.

The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).

You're right! Edited my comment.

But you've also got a 20% chance of landing it twice and a 7% chance of landing it three times and a 2% chance of landing it four times and so, on average, you'll land it every 333 days.

> Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

Siempre me asombra ver la diversidad de personas en HN. En que parte de Mexico estas? Saludos!

Saludos de Mérida, Yucatán!

What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.

If you'd like more details, the recruiter I'm thinking of is https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/. They probably have stuff elsewhere as well. I just started a position in security (which I found here on HN on the last Who Wants To Be Hired thread!) so I didn't follow up but I know they are looking for Python people.

Good luck!

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked”

Also known as survivorship bias.

Not necessarily. A prerequisite for winning any game is showing up. Those who show up most often are therefore more likely to win.

Someone who practices a skill for 20 hours a week for a year will have had 1040 hours of practice vs 258 hours of practice for someone who practices 5 hours a week, and that linear increase in time will likely produce an exponential increase in skill as knowledge builds on itself. Assuming there's a market for the skill, the odds of success in that market will also go up exponentially. And if demand shrinks (ie economic recession) that filters out the 5-hours-a-week people.

Assuming we have defined "success" and the person A will multiply their chance of success by 2 after each try.

That leaves almost zero chances of success.

Success, however we choose to define it, is in large part a result of luck. Skill, to a much lesser degree.

Luck and skill aren't mutually exclusive. They work together.

Maybe with a uselessly broad definition of "luck", as in "lucky to be born at the right time for software to be a viable career" or "lucky to be alive, the dead can't earn any money at all".

But if you think that successful engineers are only successful because they just magically got hired one day, and if they never learned any science, math, or got an engineering degree and put in zero or near-zero effort they would have had the same odds of been hired, that's just not a logical argument. Same goes for other professions.

We all start with the hand we're dealt by the universe, but it is possible to improve one's odds quite substantially given time and good decisions (that's arguably the definition of a "good decision").

I think of it like `success = (luck * skill)`. Meaning that if you have all the skill in the world, but the absolute worst luck, you can still fail, and vice versa, but with that said, the majority of possibilities for luck can be countered by higher skill.

Is Ken Thompson lucky? Probably was very lucky to have influences to point him towards electrical engineering and computer science, but with his level of skill, it's hard to imagine him not having a huge impact somewhere. Ending up at Bell Labs (let's say that's luck since he could've worked in a variety of environments) is definitely lucky, but he wouldn't have created UNIX if he didn't also have the skill. I think this goes for the majority of figures in computer science (I don't know enough about other fields to say that about them).

I honestly don't know how people who attribute everything to luck even manage to exist in the world.

Do you just sit at home staring at the wall waiting for luck to happen to you? What is the point of doing anything if all results only come from blind luck?

You engage with luck. Improve your skills and cultivate luck.

Anecdotal : every job I've had came from relations, 1st to 3rd degree.

Just because there's possibly some survivorship bias in their viewpoint doesn't mean their statement is automatically false.

I like to call that the survivorship bias bias. Similar to the sunk cost fallacy fallacy

Ha, that's a good name for it. We can go so far in trying to compensate for biases and fallacies that we introduce whole new ones!

Or rather the old adege of:

“The luck favors the prepared”

or the ones that never give up

People just remember that there are no guarantees. Dedication and hard work help a lot but you may still fail.

It's so hard to know when to give up on something you're dedicated to when it has high pay off but a moderately low chance of success.

"The harder you work, the luckier you get."

Also knows as being valuable

Survivorship bias is a valid thing to bring up when the odds are low. When the odds are fairly high, it isn't very useful. "A tech job, somewhere" is not a high bar.

In 2015, my first software job paid 95k and it wasn't a small firm. It was a large, publicly traded software company. It's possible salaries could plateau in this industry. You'll "make it" but you won't be making bank like the unprecented growth in stock valuations that occurred in the 2000s and 2010s. Silicon Valley won't be minting as many millionaires as it did in those decades.

I think the 2000's were a bust for most people. It was the proverbial lost decade. We had the dot-com crash, followed by 9/11, a short recovery, then the GFC a few short years later. It wasn't until 2013 or so that things got back to positive. If you adjust for inflation, it's even worse. Play around with https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

Dev Bootcamp popularized rails bootcamps, and they weren't even founded until 2012. The bootcamp "scene" definitely wasn't around in 2008.

Woops, you're right, I mixed up my eras.

Maybe they weren't called bootcamps, but these short webdev training courses have been around since the late 1990s.

The classes/courses prior to Dev Bootcamp et al. were vastly different and not comparable to current programs, and certainly did not have even close to the number of students/customers.

This is an unfalsifiable assertion. It also implies that if you failed, you just didn't want it hard enough. That's not a message that people who are having trouble finding a job need to hear.

Yeah that's why I said 'I know it's wrong and irrational', haha. It helped me when I had trouble finding a job. Maybe different people need different messages. Like the OSCP motto, 'when the going gets tough, try harder'. For some people that would be demotivating, whereas for others it has the opposite effect.

Perhaps people have 'motivational styles' and the best approach is to learn what kind of message works best for one's personal styles.

I went through a bootcamp too.

I'd look around the room and "Man at least half of these folks have no chance.".

It is very much a thing that for most people you need to be "INTERESTED" in how this works for it to work out as a career / push through frustration and have the tenacity to keep at it.

Just programming as a job with tasks like a garbage man or something where you go do the thing and never do it if you don't have to ... just is a rough way to learn.

In the age of RSUs, graduating in the middle of a recession is financially incredible IF you managed to get the job before all the hiring freezes AND it is at one of the publicly traded big N companies with good trade volume. Your RSU price is lower, you get more stock units for the same dollar amount at the time of joining in your initial grant (arguably much more important than refreshers).

I have a friend who recently got his MSFT joining RSUs at $130 a few weeks ago.

Your friend figured out how to time the market. Amazing.

His parents were the ones who really showed foresight.

I hear winning the lottery is also financially incredible.

Don't count your chickens before they vest, in 6 months somebody might be getting them at $90

Yea, but who has more time for the market to swing back up than a 22 year old?

A 21 year old.

Assuming the compensation is 2/3 salary, 1/3 equity, that drop is only 10%. I'm worrying more about keeping my job than the value of my equity.

It's advisable to hold your RSUs for at least one year for a favourable tax treatment, so the 33% discount he got is still very good; he's likely not going to sell his RSUs in six months.

He got the offer and decided on his start date way back in August of last year so any luck he happens by is good luck. He could've chosen to be luckier if the stock price goes down further, but I'd say this is pretty lucky as it is already for something he can't control.

Edit: ignore the tax part, I think I'm wrong there.

Isn't the favorable tax treatment only on the appreciation from the vest price?

Ah I'm not too sure. That might be the case.

RSU is taxed at vest, exactly like cash bonus for tax purposes. If you sell it immediately, it's really exactly like cash.

And you can't offset your capital losses with RSU vesting, really really exactly like cash haha.

Yes. RSUs for publicly traded companies are for functionally equivalent to a cash for tax purposes. Not selling them immediately is the same as if your employer had given you a cash bonus and you bought shares of the company with the whole thing.

I'm not sure what tax treatment you're talking about, but I'm guessing you mean converting short-term capital gains into long-term. RSUs are taxed as income based on the price on the vesting date, so if you sell when it vests there's no capital gains and thus no advantage in waiting.

That said, I think Microsoft still does a 1-year cliff, so they won't have anything to sell for a year anyway.

You're thinking of ESPP, and that's 12 or 18 months.

That's not that financially incredible. That's the price that MSFT was at less than a year ago.

Glad someone else noticed this. We are yet to have a crash from the coronavirus pandemic. You'd need another compound 50% off before I call it a crash.

Indeed, we're currently somewhat above the nadir in 2018 when we were all worried about the effects of 10-25% tariffs on $250 billion of US imports of Chinese products.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am definitely not feeling as confident in the mid-term, or even long-term outlook as I was then in 2018.

I'm neutral on the market right now, I don't think it's entirely unfairly priced. NASDAQ is in the best shape of the indices because tech companies don't seem hugely affected by all this insanity. Most major investment banks are expecting a huge boom in Q4/Q1 and return to business as usual. COVID new cases are trending downwards across all major economies (except the US, to follow soon) [1]

I'm actually feeling better now than I was in October 2018. Rates are lower, tons of financial stimulus, a waning problem and a warming stock market.

[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

The issue is without herd immunity or a vaccine this can all start up again from a single case anywhere in the world. That’s a lot of uncertainty.

Indeed but as virulent as it is, and with so many people having zero symptoms or mild flulike symptoms, we're all going to get it. The question is whether we get it first, or the vaccine is developed first. Either way, this will sort itself out shortly.

Both social distancing and herd immunity reduce the R factor. Thus nearly everyone may end up with the disease in NYC, but in less dense areas it can stamped out with vastly lower infection rates.

That alone could make the difference between 70% vs 30% of the US population getting even with minimal precautions.

Yeah but no less dense area stands alone. One person from a more dense area visits a less dense area and we're right back at it.

I am hopeful we can suppress this disease before herd immunity develops in cities. But, once that happens they stop acting like dense areas in terms of disease spread.

It’s really a question of regional R factors under various levels of social distancing, population, and herd imminuty.

I have a pet theory that what we're essentially doing is running a huge experiment where we select for the least dangerous strains of the coronavirus. People who get a mild flu or no symptoms at all are less well quarantined and are significantly more likely to pass it on to other people. People who get the worst symptoms are tightly quarantined in hospital, reducing their chances of passing on the worst forms of the virus.

It's probably not true and it isn't really based in any biological knowledge but it kind of makes sense in relation to what I've read about how the Spanish Flu epidemic ended.

That's exactly what happens. Diseases don't "want" to actually kill their hosts; it kills them too. If evolution was selecting for more dangerous variants over time, we'd all be long dead; multicellular life might not even be possible. But it's actually selecting for things that live in the host indefinitely and spread over long periods of time, which leave the host alive in order to do so.

In the long term, the coronavirus will very likely either be entirely eradicated by human action or become just another cold... but first you have to survive to see that long term.

This is also why the worst diseases you see are zoonoses, diseases that spread from other species. They are co-evolved (if you want the term for this, look up "coevolution") with their hosts, then they jump into us and do the things that they "think" will just lightly affect their hosts and let them spread, and we keel over dead because those are the wrong things.

That's why herpesviridae are so successful. In the US a full half of folks have HSV-1 (cold sores).

Apparently, due to having its own proofreading mechanism, the virus is very stable genetically. I heard that over all the different strains that have been sequenced worldwide, the maximum difference is just 15 base pairs!

The Spanish flu was selected for extra virulence, because it started during a war and the sickest soldiers were sent back from the front to hospitals. Usually when people get sick, they isolate themselves, so the weakest forms spread.

There's enough social distancing going on in NYC right now to prevent the majority of people from ever getting it. It doesn't seem likely that the social distancing will be let up enough (and subsequently not clamped back down) to the point of allowing most people to get it.

On the surface that seems to be true. NYC has ~8.4 million people minus those who left the city. ~1% of the population has already tested positive (81,803), and compared to yesterday (81,803 - 76,876) = 4,727 people are testing positive per day which would take years before everyone gets it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_N...

More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth phase when South Korea’s CFR is 2% after cases peaked when it was 0.6% in the growth phase. This suggests NYC is massively undercounting cases and the actual rate of infection could be something like 5-10x as high, with the virus reaching 50+% of the population in months at it’s current rate of spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...

PS: A more nuanced look taking into account differences in the overall and infected populations could narrow that estimate down. But, it should not be assumed South Korea discovered every case or that each country is counting deaths in the same way.

For sure we're undercounting. I had it and I'm not part of any official count because there's no way to get tested. My cohabiting girlfriend almost certainly had it, but she was entirely asymptomatic. Once you factor in all the asymptomatic people, in addition to all the symptomatic people who didn't end up hospitalized and thus likely couldn't get tested, the multiplier on the confirmed cases could easily be significantly more than 10X.

Pessimistically it seems that something like up to 10% of the city's population got it by the time that almost everything shut down, and now that almost everything is shut down, the spread has been vastly, vastly curtailed, as we see from new hospital admissions figures (which don't suffer from the same kinds of underreporting bias).

The test rate is next to useless.

Death counts are a less unreliable indicator. Current death counts in NYC- over 7,000 using both the health department counts before Apr 5 plus the FDNY counts, tho even that still has to be an undercount- indicate that at minimum around the time of lockdown (Mar 22) at least 300,000 were "infected"- at a 2% CFR and MTTD of 15 days- but more likely closer to 700,000 or 800,000. That's 3 weeks ago.

With known new death counts currently in the mid to high hundreds, that adds tens of thousands of infections 2-3 weeks ago.

My take is- we are already today at over 1M infections in NYC. And we have a grim fork ahead- either we see a steep drop in death counts, or we see a steady or gradual decline.

A steep drop from lockdown means lockdown works, but also means we still have another few million in susceptible population as things start to open up.

If we only see a gradual or steady decline, COVID more quickly becomes the largest cause of death in NYC for 2020, and we know that lockdown doesnt work well enough to keep from progressing through the population, but we also know we have much less of a susceptible population remaining.

Well, if he had joined two weeks prior, his RSU price would've been $190, so he basically got 33% more RSUs. It's basically luck but I'm happy for him.

Finding a job in the middle of a recession is financially incredible

Anecdotally I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam from these types of companies on Linkedin and my current company that offers a good deal of RSU's is still hiring. It's not everywhere but in this particular recession and within those offers already offering lots of high value RSU's I suspect hiring is not slowing by a ton.

Recruitment spamming isn't useful for accessing hiring rate. Recruiters are always building their database of who is out there and gathering information.

I mean building your database via "I'd like to connect" message is one thing, getting specific job descriptions + being asked to start the recruitment process is a bit farther than that. I'm getting about the same ratio of type so far the past month. I'm not saying it's 1 to 1 but these companies are at least still actively hiring, and I have no reason to doubt that based on my company doing the same.

Gathering information is the recruitment process. It's just used to filter the good candidates out of bad candidates. The process is further used to get a valuation of what each candidate is willing or desiring to be paid and this is the main reason recruiters will always be working. I'm still being spammed as well and where the recruitment process is part of the spam. I work in academia which I enjoy and I'm not looking to leave my job but I do think the actual hiring will slow somewhat down. Too early to predict how much in all areas of engineering but I assume in a few months we will see.

This might be off topic but why is the initial grant much more important than refreshers?

most rank and file get next to nothing for refreshers.

Are companies lowering the equity value of their offers currently? They might do that if they believe the stock will recover by 20-30% in 6 months, but I'm not on the job market so I don't know if companies are actually doing this.

Sure, if you time everything right, you can make out very well. All these things have to line up.

(FYI I bought MSFT stock for half that, back in 2017.)

Programming for the web is my primary career. I first got into it late 1997. I am astonished at how incompetent it is. The fact the OP made a career out of it and made some money is hardly amazing. For the level of talent required contrasted against the average compensation I am surprised not everybody is trying it. You too could be earning 6 figures in a low cost of living economy after completing a boot camp and 2 years experience not being any good.

Don’t really know how to do your job? No problem. After 30 years web technology standards have largely solidified and cross browser concerns are no longer noticeable. If you work on the front end a large framework and 10000 NPM packages can be pushed into a website to do all the heavy lifting. If that’s not enough jQuery is still a thing. If that’s still not enough the business will simply hire additional bodies to fill the gaps of accessibility and any original problems that might come up. The backend is pretty similar with Spring MVC, Maven, and tons of data packages that perform data or service handling for spring.

The last half of my corporate career has been spent trying to untangle the spaghetti mistakes of other developers who probably shouldn’t have writing any unsupervised code as opposed to writing original feature logic.

I know many developers have lost their jobs in the current economic crisis. This includes both good developers and really bad developers. In all the bad and disruption that comes from that I hope businesses will become more thoughtful about simply throwing money away on web technologies and developers.

Historically businesses have vaguely realized just how bad and incompetent their web technology is but never did anything to fix it. Some businesses, even large mega .coms, would go bust than fix it (and their business). Really the only answer ever applied was hire better talent without defining what that is and without any plan on what to do with or how to apply that new talent. That is a leadership/business problem and not a technology or talent problem. Hiring is not the answer but instead only feeds the problem. It makes sense though, bad leaders aren’t going to blame themselves for problems like this and it’s generally not their money they are throwing away on bad decisions and empty solutions.

Other industries have solved these problems long ago. They have things like broker/agent relationships, licensing, continuing education, and personal liability. The incompetence of software does not want any of this. They want the least possible effort to immediate high income.

Wish it was like that in the UK. I work with some pretty talented people and we're paid what would be considered peanuts in the bay area (but fairly standard here), and even then half of us have just been furloughed. Lots of code sucks but that's often due to unrealistic deadlines as much as the talents of the developers.

Code sucks everywhere. Unless you're working on a library or something personal, then there's no (or very few) organisations that are churning out 'academically pure' code. The UK doesn't software industry doesn't have dibs on that.

Some companies write code that's public, and then, while it might still suck, there is at least some motivation for improving it, and a better chance of it being paletable.

I've worked for a company which had a 100% open-source product and their priority was to keep that boat floating rather than making any improvements.

Probably because the resource requirements to actually be able to do that were way above what they had at their disposal. Especially having such an old codebase.

The time it takes to make simple updates should be enough motivation. I just spent the best part of a day adding a simple dialog before submitting a form. Took forever to get the development environment put together to run the code locally then trying to understand the mess of JavaScript in the relevant function with all it's nested callbacks to add a couple of lines of code. I tried refactoring it a bit, hopefully its a bit more readable for the next person. I doubt anyone will actually give a shit though.

I agree, but somehow most of my managers over the years don't. :-(

Yup. A lot of processes and reviews are put into place. But once the business demands something to be done at a certain date, all of that usually takes a backseat or even thrown out the window.

The tech industry is a class-, gender-, and race-biased inter-generational wealth transfer scheme masquerading as an industry. Past a post of base-level competency, and excluding strategy-level technical roles, employment and compensation is based on identity and not proficiency.

It's the same as with industry labor in the last half of the 20th century. Every person who retired with a pension was not an unequivocal value-add to their employer; there was a need to support and enable the consumptive lifestyles of the public (but only the "right people"), lest the entire system implode.

No one wants to admit that they're mere cogs, compensated for not gumming up the money machine. They want to believe that they have value. And they do, but it's implicit in their identity, not necessarily their productivity. If you don't believe it, ask how much your colleagues in India make.

While that could be a factor I think the situation is primarily the result of simple economic considerations. Companies compete for employees, which drives platform commonalities and group think across business lines. It is cheaper to hire a ready to work developer from a competing employer than it is train an employee over time regardless of the fact that incoming employee still has to relearn the new company's business and internal processes. So, there are financial incentives to be impatient and make bad decisions even though there is ramp up time regardless. Even though finding qualified employment candidates generally costs as much as training somebody to be qualified it is generally preferred for its lower overhead and convenience.

In many other white-color industries employees are accountable for their work. A substantial enough violation of that accountability can result in loss of career (from any employer), fines, and even prison time depending on the violation of negligence. Because of that there are conventions in place to define qualification:

* An agent/broker relationship ensures that all employees are essentially practicing interns operating under the guidance of a broker. The poor performance of an agent negatively influences the reputation of the broker so guidance and mentoring are provided as a required effect. Very few employers in software provide anything close to that. If you want that you have to go get it on your own outside of work, which is why so many excellent developers are largely self-taught and have some time in on some sort of extraordinary product before it became well known.

* Licensing ensures that candidates meet some minimal, uniform, standard level of qualification. Usually licensing standards are run as industry specific charities to influence the standards of practice and ethical norms. Software doesn't have this either. Nobody can provide a standard definition of competence in software. In most other industries this one factor drives the direction of education and training more than just about everything else combined.

>ask how much your colleagues in India make

My colleagues in India, on average, make less than me. My Indian colleagues in the US (who grew up and went to school in India) make about the same as me.

I dont see what point this thought exercise was supposed to illustrate, aside from demonstrating that labor markets in different countries are different, and so is the cost of living.

>No one wants to admit that they're mere cogs, compensated for not gumming up the money machine.

Reality is unpleasant so people are in denial. Some peasants here down voted you. I just up voted you.

- another peasant

I started around a similar time frame, and was around during the dot-com boom. One dot-bomb company was "growing so fast" (lots of hype, almost no revenues...) that it would hire almost anyone off the street.

We also hired a lot of good people who had their skills misapplied for developing a product that made little sense. $millions were wasted.

People today would be astonished at the tech interviews back then. It was literally show up, BS for an hour, here's your offer letter. One dude even typed up the offer letter while I was in the interview. Whiteboard coding was unheard of.

Hiring processes have really changed since then. What do you think of them now?

I think they've swung too far in the other direction. A recent interview experience from the past decade was 6 hour long interviews, 2 to 3 people in each, tons of whiteboard coding.

Somewhere there is a happy medium.

I think you're overestimating the demand for junior engineers with no formal college education. It's tough for them to get in, especially in LCOL areas where the job market isn't competitive.

This is true, but it's still significantly easier than doing the same for any other high paying profession, where education is an almost guaranteed requirement.

That depends on how you define junior. Some people define that as less than certain years of experience on a resume. Some people define it in technical terms, in scope of particular competencies, or terms of interview performance.

Since there is no uniform definition of competence my personal definition is anybody who does this job but either advocates fear of writing original code or who cannot write any code without a superficial abstraction (jQuery, React, Angular) is a junior regardless of years of experience. I also know there are a lot of people who disagree with that definition.

In this particular example, I'm referring to exclusively with individuals with no industry experience and no degree from an accredited program (e.g., ABET). Some people with minimal (but some) industry experience are still called junior.

I'm not highly experienced in this realm but I sometimes wonder if the liability in our industry is misaligned which may cause many of these symptoms.

When a company faces a huge security breach due to negligence, who pays the cost? I've known many engineers rightfully pointing out necessary work to prevent security issues that have to negotiate with product owners and business stakeholders to find time to perform such work. And guess who never gets the time to work on those issues?

How many companies actually audit their dependencies and run their own package management infrastructure to protect themselves against liabilities?

If developers were liable then companies would be obligated to hire a professional engineer, pay their insurance, and there would be repercussions for avoiding their recommendations. I suspect companies would be much more cautious about "releasing early, releasing often," and "moving fast and breaking things," if there were penalties for making poor decisions that affect the safety and property of people.

That's all true but I don't think it explains the effect GP is talking about.

Security aside, I think it just comes down to what the business incentives are for different approaches to software development. To develop good software you need small teams of experts with domain knowledge and very strong programming skills. But good software isn't the only kind of profitable software.

A lot of big businesses are working with multipliers on the benefit side that eclipse the factors on the cost side. If you don't have a particular piece of software 'X', where X is something that would generate revenue multiplied across a really large customer base, then almost any strategy that produces X is going to be a strong one. From a business perspective it's not going to make any difference if you hire a 5-man black team to pump out the perfect bit of software or 150 cheap consultants to hack together a giant pile of shit. The former might make you $150M instead of $120M, but nobody is going to have stats on the path not taken to compare to in retrospect, so there's roughly zero market pressure to develop software properly.

Then there's two factors that explain why businesses don't take the better approach. The first is that every big business I've worked for has had layers of management and departments, where budgets are allocated artificially and aren't perfectly tied to results like they would in a pure software business with flat management that's reinvesting profits into their flagship product. That creates an environment where the objectives for middle management aren't perfectly tied to the objectives for the business (e.g. increasing their team's head count at the expense of their software).

The second is that having a larger team mitigates risk. If you put together a small team of crack developers to build a perfect product there's somewhat of a chance that they fail. Things like turnover and personal circumstances affect you a lot more. The swarm of average contractors doesn't have as big of an upside, but they're much more likely to get you to 80% of the way there, so if that's indistinguishable to a perfect solution (as above) then there's this constant natural pressure to overhire and reduce the quality of the team to the lowest common denominator. Big businesses love treating their devs as cogs, even if all the literature on the engineering side suggests that that approach doesn't work.

Basically, I don't think it's just a case of 'managers are idiots and don't know how to build good software', businesses build crap software because it works and it's profitable. But it also creates constant opportunities for startups to eat their lunch, and the worse the economy gets, the better your software has to be (because the cost side of the equation starts to matter more).

An easier way to fix that across all industries is to make the proprietor or CEO personally responsible, criminally.

We need to do the same thing with parents of minors.

A lot of things would be resolved with a little bit of personal responsibility and finally CEO risk would match the pay.

I too graduated with a CS degree from a highly ranked technical University.

It was probably the worst time for recent graduate with a CS degree. You hear news of all jobs going to India. Nobody in the US was hiring developers. In fact, they were getting all laid off.

I had to scrape by taking odd jobs here and there. I worked as a short-order cook, made jewelry in a factory, worked at a UPS warehouse, etc. It felt hopeless and felt like I wasted money and time getting a CS degree.

Eventually I joined a tiny web-shop for super low pay. I was underpaid for many years afterwards. In 2006, I joined a "real company" but still was underpaid. I quickly left that company and started making more money elsewhere. I got nervous in 2008 since that recession came right when my career started to get good and stable. But I was safe, and it was smooth sailing.

My story has survivor bias. But it took a lot of hustling, grit, depression, etc. from 2001 to 2007. It can take a long time to get back on your feet, at least in my case.

This is part of the reason we are / were paid so much recently. Hardly any young people went into technology from dot-com until around 12 or so (unless they were passionate about it), precisely because everyone was telling kids that programming was so easily outsourced that you'll never make money at it.

There's a distinct dips in the number of 30-40 year olds in technology. There are plenty of older people, and there are now tons of younger people, but few in between. From age 20 to about 30, I was always the youngest person on my team. Now this is no longer the case, but those who are younger are 10+ years younger.

People today are amazed when I tell them I only made $10/hr in my first programming gig. People who graduated in the 90s were making $40-50k out of school and today it's not uncommon to get 70k+ in the mid-west. The early 00s were a different time.

$15/hr at mine, although if I include freelancing prior to that it's probably closer to $8. It's kind of nice. My floor is so incredibly low that the "scary times" don't look so scary.

CS was a contrarian career bet in the few years after dotcom; you didn't do it if you were listening to the wise old men and wanted a good paying job. Realizing that opportunity -- or, more commonly, doing what you wanted to and not worrying about the $, paid off incredibly well for those who took advantage from between 2004ish and today. I don't think fortunes will change for our cohort; there's still a huge dearth of principal engineers in pretty much every subarea of software engineering.

The enrollment surge also hasn't yet effected CS PhDs, because undergrad enrollment wasn't matched by a corresponding growth in phd enrollment. That might change in the next 5 years.

But the entry level positions seem extraordinarily competitive at the moment; I've never had this many qualified applicants (and that goes for before covid19 as well). The only saving grace is that more and more non-programming positions require some programming skills, and those folks seem to have a hard time recruiting/hiring.

I think it's true. Around 2010 is when CS got hot again.

A few years ago, we interviewed some new graduates. I couldn't believe how smart they were. They seemed a lot smarter than I was when I graduated. Heck, they seemed smarter than me right now. There are definitely a ton of highly qualified, recent grads these days.

I think the main thing we ( as in our generation of late 30's to 40's) have to worry about these days is ageism. We might become obsolete quick if businesses think the new, smart, cheaper kids can replace us aging ones.

This brings back so many memories. I graduated with a Comp Sci degree from a well-regarded university. I had friends who graduated a year earlier return to school for a different degree because there was just nothing available with a degree in CS. So demoralizing.

I graduated a year later and took a job making a little over minimum wage. At that time, the most influential executives at my workplaces said software engineering in America was dead, to be replaced by cheaper outsourced Indians, and then other countries once they became too expensive. It set the course of my career. I am in tech but not a Software Engineer. Had I graduated a year later, I am sure I would be a Software Engineer today.

The fear and feeling of instability in this industry never left me.

I'm pushing 40, graduated high school in 2000. I heard a lot of the same "wisdom." For some reason I just really wanted to be a software developer so I stuck with it even though the dot com bubble was in full catastrophe mode. I'm glad I did, but I can't claim magic wisdom. I don't know how kids are supposed to get good life/career advice. I surely didn't.

Perhaps the only thing I can reasonably suggest is that people create a "skill stack" instead of a skill. I'm a good coder, but coding is probably among my least economically valuable skills. My most valuable skill, by far, is communication. I can explain technical things to non-technical people and do so in a way that doesn't make them feel dumb. Part of the key there is I know they're not dumb. That wins you a lot of favors. My second most valuable skill is having a basic understanding of economics/business, how incentives work, how business decisions are made, etc. This helps me anticipate the needs of others at work and help solve their real problems which they may not even see clearly themselves.

If the stats offer any credibility... I work from home full time and have for nearly a decade. I've got 2 concurrent contracts going on right now. I'm expecting to make >$300k this year. I live in a 2nd tier city with a low cost of living, you've heard of it but it's not NY/LA/etc. I've never even applied to a FAANG type place.

I'm a college senior who feels like the world has been pulled out from under me. Would love to talk to you about your life. Email is on my profile.

i started my work life as a developer in 2001/2002, right after the internet bubble burst. If you're in comp science with a real college degree, you really don't have anything to worry about in the middle / long term.

People are actually using tech even more now than before, it means priority will change towards using more tech people, not less. As soon as the lockdown stops and economy start again you'll be fine.

The trouble is for short term finance, especially if you have a student loan to repay. Depending on which country you live in, government will probably provide some support. In the meantime save as much money as you can on daily spendings if you're in that situation.

What kind of job do you do? You sound like me, with the exception that I'm at the start of my career and am getting rejected everywhere the past year.

I've been a coding bootcamp instructor and was praised by students for my communication. My friends are mostly entrepreneurs, consultants and business people and I talk quite a bit about business with them and my coding skills relatively to that are alright.

I don't really have a specialty. The last 3 years I've been doing Identity and Access Management. Before that I've done everything from physical security systems, insurance, enterprise web development, truck dispatching, point of sale... all over the place really.

I'm aware of how awful this is going to sound, but I'm totally unfamiliar with the process of applying to tons of places and getting rejected. When I'm short work I call up a gig company like TekSystems and most places I interview I get an offer. I am not particular about the kind of work I do, so if someone meets my $ requirement, I usually accept the first offer I get. It was always like that, even in the early days before I had a resume/experience. I wish I had some wisdom to offer in that regard, but I got nothing. I'm not particularly charismatic or anything. In fact, I'm a bit on the spectrum. I'm smart, but not crazy smart, about 120 iq if that's a thing that concerns people. I'm also a college dropout.

To add a minor expansion on the "skill stack" concept, I'd introduce the phrase "think like a ____." The thing I spend the most time with mentoring is teaching people who to think like a programmer. You'd think that would come with the degrees, but it really doesn't. Regarding your skill stack and spending time around consultants/entrepreneurs, do you think you can think like an entrepreneur? A person can know a lot of history facts, but not know how to think like a historian. This is a really important threshold to get past in the building of a skill stack. Think about something you're really good at and think about what it means to think like one of those. Maybe you're a gamer. Do you understand what it means to "think like a gamer?"

Hey I am a bit younger than you but have a very similar resume of working contracts, never applying to FAANGs and reaching out to people/networks when I am looking for work. I definitely feel like I'm doing well but it would be great to speak to someone else who has succeeded at this sort of "alternative" career path. Is there a way I can reach you to ask for some specific advice? Or would you contact me? ritchiea at gmail dot com

I just emailed you.

I'm someone who's started the traditional career path and doesn't like it. I've halfheartedly started a consulting firm, and I'm spending time shifting my focus to that. I'd also love to chat with you.

thomas dot spader at gmail dot com, if you'd like to

I get that you're unaware of it. I was as well. I freelanced for a bit. For whatever reason that actually was easier to get. But then I tried to play it safe, and got into a year long apply-rejection cycle.

maybe try entry level project management jobs. i have a business and computer science degree, always more inclined towards the business side rather than technical or coding, and project management is perfect for that, plus it pays well.

> I don't know how kids are supposed to get good life/career advice.

They need a good support structure at home, at school, and they need successful people in their lives. I think most kids are lucky to have 2 of those, let alone all three. Hell, even kids with all three end up majoring in something useless, or dropping out of school, or worse.

Slightly tangential, but why is the major so important in the US for hiring? If I want to join some generic grad scheme (e.g. Proctor and Gamble, an accountancy firm) do I need to have done a business or economics major?

In the UK the requirement for a graduate role is usually just any degree unless you’re applying for something specific. Possibly this is because UK degrees are more specialised. I also suspect that for most graduate business jobs your academic knowledge isn’t very important.

It just strikes me as a better way of allowing people to study what they want rather than requiring an endless stream of drones.

> At that time, the most influential executives at my workplaces said software engineering in America was dead, to be replaced by cheaper outsourced Indians, and then other countries once they became too expensive.

I remember my first software internship, in 2003. Two weeks into the job, the company's VP came into our office for a little pep talk (the project was way behind schedule). The gist of the talk was that in India there are programmers who are 4x cheaper than us (I was in Poland), so we must be 4x as productive as them. In hindsight, it seemed that the VP was part of the same groupthink as everybody else... Now, I know to not treat such sexy extrapolations that the business people are excited about too seriously. In 2020, they are things like data-driven organizations, AI, autonomous vehicles, perhaps "Industry 4.0"? (I don't know anything about the last part).

I was part of the dotcom crash. I went to community college which made things more difficult than university grads. Many people left the field in my year. Not really sure how many programmers are left in the group today either.

After living in java throughout school I managed to get a minimum wage 6 month contract in php and never looked back transforming that into 6 more months and fighting out a 2500 month wage for my last 3 month contract with them.

The interview for that was tough. In the end it was myself and another person from university who spoke in more advanced terms. The final piece was a take home assignment and I did it quickly and the other person couldn't so I got the job. After I got the role I would see the candidate she would come in and have lunch with the a co-founder she connected with during the interview process. When she found out she didn't get the role she cried in the middle of the room for so long, very uncomfortable. There was always a bit of hate from that co-founder after, you could tell the co-founders were fighting (they were a couple founder team). My advice know your stuff and when you get the call give it your all even if it looks/seems impossible.. I applied to so many jobs before I got even that interview.

Wow, giving you hate for a decision they made. A couple founder team is a red flag for me.

I was in the same situation as OP. I got "lucky" in getting a job in operations analysis instead of software development due to my poor GPA. A lot of my friends had their much higher offers delayed or rescinded while I kept my not-so-glamorous job at a Fortune 500.

I would say that 100% of my friends recovered and most have better career trajectories than I. You will make it through this. One bit of advice: don't be overly picky. Opportunity seems to favor those who do instead of sit on the sideline.

All of a sudden my unsexy junior dev job at shitcorp isn't so bad.

I feel you, A few months ago I hated my job and was looking to move somewhere else but now I feel ok about it. I'm still working and I get to work from home now. Things are ok.

I'm perfectly happy at my job at a very small established company. Unbelievable freedom, no mandatory overtime, everybody is on a first name basis with the CEO, no stress, no "PIP"s, no worries about my equity going down the toilet, and I got my own office.

My total compensation might be half of what I could get at large corps but I don't need to live in a city (lower rent and housing prices, fresher air) and money isn't everything. I can commute the short way to the office via bike which takes off even more time I spend at work.

Working at small companies can be really good.

I was gearing up to switch companies Q1.

That plan is definitely getting shelved for now.

I graduated from university at the exact moment the dot com bust occurred, and the job market went from fizzing to non-existent in the space of a few weeks.

I ended up working at a local charity, and then entering into a business incubator but for a couple of years I had no money to speak of. If I felt rich, I'd have McDonalds for lunch.

On the other hand, I was living in a cool part of town with a group of people who I still keep in touch with - those days were the best in some ways.

So yes, it does get better, but people's expectations will need some major adjustments. I do firmly believe that it's a good opportunity to set yourself up for when the recovery occurs.

I imagine its worse now with the Student debt bubble - too many people with 100k in student loans.

Not to mention that the coming downturn is likely to depress wages for most jobs, including developers. Debt isn't an issue if you can afford to maintain it, and most people with student debt thought they would be entering a highly lucrative market. That might turn out to be wrong for the next decade.

This is an opportunity for businesses to reduce wages for new hires because people will just be thankful they've got a job.

The average Bachelor’s graduates has $38K in debt in graduation, the price of a new car. To get to $100K you usually need to go to graduate school.

I'd like to see the distribution curve, I know a number of "normal" (i.e., not terrible irresponsible) people with significantly more.

I imagine people from well off, but not wealthy, families who won't or can't assist in paying for their education come out with more because theres basically no aid available for them.

My college had a 30k/year tuition. 4 years of that comes out to 120k. Your figure assumes >70% of costs are paid without debt. 30k/year is common now for an undergraduate degree from a state school with dorm.

I was asked to estimate costs of doing a college.

What they estimated was that at a given moment, I would spend an average amount of an hour of money on a university's budget. This means I would actually have to budget an average of $60,000 a year to pay for it.

That's $60,000 if you count out fees on each member of their state.

All of the posts by this account are off topic.

1. 30k/year is REALLY high for tuition. Most state flagships -- which are some of the best universities in the entire world -- aren't that expensive. UIUC, definitely one of the best CS departments in the world, has tuition that's about half that per year [1]. And that's a top-tier state flagship research university; a bit of an overkill for any but the most ambitious (phd or md or jd or elite co.)-bound students. The regional campuses, which do an excellent job at preparing you for typical entry level industry gigs in most fields, have tuition closer to $10k/year [2]. If you want a "normal" life -- decent salary in exchange for a 40 hour work week, in a relatively normal stress environment, and without attending a top-tier graduate program -- don't go to a top-tier state flagship.

2. Most private universities do have sticker prices in that range, but a) why go non-elite private (e.g., mid-low tier liberal arts colleges) since they're usually not even as good as comparable public schools, and b) almost no one actually pays the sticker price at private universities. The average discount factor at private universities is around 50% [3].

3. It's definitely possible to make >$10K each year while doing university full time. Even very conservative estimates -- state minimum wage and only working summers/weekends with no overtime -- put the number north of $8K [4].

4. Living at home is often an option (not always, but the percentage of people who can't live at home and also don't qualify for need-based aid has to be pretty small).

5. Four years is an upper bound, not a requirement! College-ready students can and should transfer credits from high school AP, IB, or college credit courses; one of those three options is available in the vast majority of US high schools. Students who are not college-ready should start off at community college, which, again, brings the price down substantially.

So, for example, if you:

* go to your local branch campus of a state university like SIU-E or UMSL,

* live at home,

* work a minimum wage job for 40 hours over the summer and on the most weekends during the school year [4], and

* come in with sophomore standing OR do you first year at community college

then you can graduate with a very modest amount of debt (less than a used car, or possibly none at all). Cutting any one of those assumptions still keeps you well below $100K and possibly much lower than even $30K.

Plus, some of those assumptions are conservative. E.g., for most of that time you should be able to make substantially more than minimum wage by taking internships, tutoring ($20/hr+ is typically a "low" rate), etc. Scholarships and fellowships are typically available as well.

College is far too expensive in the USA, but you really have to be a huge outlier to graduate from undergrad with $100K in debt. And it's still possible in many parts of the country to graduate with "used car" worth of debt or even no debt at all.

Part of our "college affordability" problem is real, but part of the problem is a "buying luxury goods with a credit card" problem. Attending one of the best universities in the world and living in their dorms and staying for four full years and not working full time over the summers + weekends during the school year... that's the most expensive option possible. There are plenty of much less expensive options for most college students in the US.

[1] https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/tuition

[2] https://www.siue.edu/paying-for-college/tuition-and-fees/und...

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-report...

[4] (408.2512) + (168.25(52-12-3)) = $8,844

> 1. 30k/year is REALLY high for tuition. Most state flagships -- which are some of the best universities in the entire world -- aren't that expensive.

So what? Prestigious schools are notoriously egalitarian toward the students. If you get accepted to Cal Tech, you are guaranteed to be subsidized. Nobody "can't afford" to go to Cal Tech, but there are people who don't test well enough.

> 2. Most private universities do have sticker prices in that range, but a) why go non-elite private

Because most people aren't even average collegiate level intelligence.

> 3. It's definitely possible to make >$10K each year while doing university full time.

Not sure what this is supposed to say, but surviving is hard out there. Especially around any school (public or private). Most people in massive debt, try to work it off.

This whole post seems a little holier than thou. Least of which is the perspective that people could (or would) attend "best universities", which is more than a little presumptuous. This debt hole is so common it appears in US media from TV (eg Grey's Anatomy, Devs, etc) to the newest films.

> So what?

So, people are choosing to go to expensive universities that don't subsidize their tuition. It's a choice, and there are much cheaper options for most of the country.

If you're paying $30K in tuition and planning on a "normal" career path, then you're paying way too much.

> This whole post seems a little holier than thou

Well, if sound financial advice is perceived as a personal attack, then we're never going to solve this problem.

People whose parents can support them by allowing them to live at home for free during college can graduate with almost no debt by attending a cheap institution, working while going to school, and getting a head start in high school or community college. And most people whose parents cannot allow them to live at home will qualify for state and federal grants.

This country does have affordable college options for most people. The problem is that most people who go to college choose the more expensive options (state flagships and non-elite private universities) even though their local state university branch campuses are capable of providing a perfectly adequate education at a third of the price.

More importantly, the only way we'll reduce the debt burden on undergraduates is by providing more subsidy to state branch campuses. That will only work, however, if people choose to go to those state branch campuses. There's just no world where the taxpayer subsidizes a big chunk of room&board&tuition at research institutions for the majority of college students. For the top ~5% of students by merit, sure. But that model just doesn't make any sense when there are far cheaper options.

> eg Grey's Anatomy

Medical debt is an entirely separate issue. Intertwining it with the undergraduate debt issue confuses things -- the solution to med school debt will be different from the solution to undergrad debt.

The people with 100k in student loans (non graduate degrees) were probably not on path towards financial greatness anyway. I can't imagine looking at all of the available schools in the world and choosing one that costs over 25k a year. If it wasn't student debt it'd be some other form

Also, housing costs are astronomical. There is no splitting a cool spot with some roommates in the cool part of town, anymore. These days, if you work in tech and feel rich eating McDonald's, your commute is at least 2 hours.

I graduated in 2002. It was devastating to my life and set my career back about a decade. Because I am from Appalachia, that only compounded the problem.

It took me 2 years to find a 'real' job as tech support with a starting salary of 28k/year. It wasnt until 5 years after graduation did I find a job I was really happy with as a DBA at a University making 40k/year.

I was still stuck, because here you have this east coaster from a no name university and their career hasn't grown much, not worth a phone screen. Things didn't really change for me until I got my masters at an Ivy league.

I was finally worth of a phone screen and risk flying to the west coast for an on-site. After that I have done really well as a data scientist for a top 5 tech, but it was not easy.

Given that I graduated in 2002, if someone finds out that I am not making TC 400k and worth millions, something must be really wrong with me.

If I made 100k out of college like many in tech do now, I would have been retired by now. At this rate, it will be about 15 years before I can retire - thats how far graduating during the wrong time set me back.

Will better days be ahead? yes. Did people graduating now end up winning a really shitty lottery? oh god yes, though probably not as bad as 2002.

Of all my friends from back in the early 2000's, we've all pretty much had the same life arc. Some people got jobs as lawyers, some at banks, some were in a band, some were social workers, and then there was me - no fancy job, no money, and just a crappy car and a very friendly cat.

20 years later, we live all around the world but the circumstances are largely similar. A job which is ok, a house, kids - nothing much to complain about really.

One of the biggest learnings I've had is that people make decisions (some of which I wouldn't personally agree with), but we all end up in mostly the same place.

People who are going to struggle for the next year or two will be fine, but the future and the path they take might be a bit different to what they expected.

The dot com burst was way worse than today. One reason is that back then the industry was 10% of what it is today, or even less. The other reason is that social distancing is creating the need to start selling online for a lot of small brick and mortar shops. Most of web development companies I know are overwhelmed by the demand in the last weeks. So we might be one of the few industries that benefits from all this mess.

The dot com bust was awesome for me, although it was the first time I had ever been fired from a job. I internalized blame for a while but then my girlfriend, who had been laid off before me, was like fuck it let's have fun in NYC and collect funemployment. We saw so much culture and had so much fun. Then that buttlock Bin Laden had to ruin it all.

Financial crisis is nothing new to the current working generation. We're getting kind of good at it I think..

Sometimes I feel like my entire life is just one crisis after another. You do get used to it after awhile.

It’s been every 7-8 years for me for my entire life. I find it very difficult to make large bets.

If you'd been betting along the market you'd be up big by now

I graduated in 2009; what you say is true. We appear to be experiencing major crises pretty much every 7-8 years now. Remember that just after the dotcom crash, there was the collapse of Enron, MCI Worldcom, Nortel Networks and others. These had a ripple effect across financial markets and devastated communities that relied on the jobs and spending those companies generated.

I mean I understand where he's coming from, but this is peak survivorship bias. No, not everyone makes it. People can't get jobs, they can't pay rent and people will suffer and some will die as a result. That's a fact of how recessions go, and I think papering it over with 'everything will be OK' just further normalizes the boom/bust cycle and all of the damage it causes to working individuals.

The people screaming survivor ship bias are the least likely to make it. Now is the time to be doubling down your hours, focusing on whats important and proving your worth. Believe in yourself and make it through to the next boom. If you're lucky with your money you may even never have to worry about the cycle again

I survived the Dot Com bubble pop.

I was at the DoubleClick Willy Wonka party where they rented out Centrofly, had topless Chelsea male models made up like Oompa-Loompas. One high up executive said to me "The sushi finally arrived, it's late. $80,000 for food and it's late.".

I saw questionable startups give away $50,000 trips to Monte Carlo as some sort of weird Silicon Alley user acquisition strategy.

When the tide goes out that's your time to strike. If you have downtime start on your passion project. It might even become a product one day.

Is that..it?

Where's the story? The paragraph about September 2001 is followed by April 2020, with nothing about what happened during the nearly 20 years in between? I don't even know what kind of work the author does currently. Maybe he's well known in tech circles, I don't know.

This is a blog post from a job board site; at least put in something resembling a narrative. Yesterday we had a similarly promotional post about how using Google Analytics was problematic, but it went into depth and mentioned a competitor before finally promoting their own analytics solution.

This is the blog equivalent of a "motivational" post on Instagram.

Meanwhile the US has seen over 16 million new unemployment filings over the last three weeks. The new filings are more than an order of magnitude greater than any previous filing. The difference is impossible to miss when graphed together with previous filings.

Yep. I read it and thought I missed some pages, maybe accidentally scrolled down or something.

The article screams "privilege."

Why do you guys assume that this crisis will hit software development?

As far as I can see software development will be one of the fields least hit, possibly even benifiting, by the fallout of the Corona-virus.

See other posts about all the software startups firing readers of this forum.

edit: latest related post on the front page is about OYO furloughing thousands https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/08/indias-oyo-furloughs-thous...

Oyo is an Indian hotel chain - of course it will suffer.

I get the allure of the sky is falling but aren’t we missing just how privileged we are having an office job that easily can be done remotely?

> Oyo is an Indian hotel chain - of course it will suffer

All software jobs are affected by overall economic activity.

For example, I'm a software dev working in the niche sector of testing and certification of electronic payment systems. If economic activity goes down, then usage of payment systems goes down, so investments in those payment systems will go down, so our revenue will go down.

Wtf are you talking about lol

Everyone loses in a recession.

The dot com bust and 9/11 is a good example of the opposite. If you were in real estate around then there was no recession at all.

Not everyone, some people prosper enormously in a recession - or more specifically, some people make bold investments during the worst part of a recession when everyone else thinks the world is ending. Those investments typically do very well when we exit the recession.

Agreed, recessions are when money is made. If you look at '00 and '08/09, investing in the down years is incredibly profitable

Except for those that have capital, or access to capital at cheap rates, and can buy up assets when their prices are depressed.

Unfortunately, my twitter feed is filled with developers being hit and I have also experienced it without being directly hit.

There are many ways that the crisis can hit software development. Investors are bleeding cash left and right and don't want to invest in anything right now. Products lose appeal. Companies don't want to pick up new software etc.. etc...

In your opinion, where the people being laid off working on valuable projects? I know its one sample, but I'm wondering if all the virus is doing is tree shaking all of the Uber for ______ ideas

Most software is either sold to non-software businesses, or is developed to serve non-software businesses.

Most non-software businesses are about to take a wallop. A ban on travel, and ten million Americans filing for unemployment in two weeks will do that sort of thing.

Why do you assume it won't be hit? Everyone knows software is relatively safe, but the deeper the layoffs get, the more likely it is that they push into highly skilled tech jobs.

Fields that will be hit: anything that relies on ad revenue, international or trans-national tourism and travel (badly), b&m retail (badly), online retail [1], entertainment [also 1], web support services, corporate web dev, real estate, fintech.

Fields that may grow: medical services and support, small-scale short-distance tourism (after 6-12 months), small scale web dev, military spending, government support and consultancy, space[2].

Basically a bimodal economy with a lot of money coming directly from government spending instead of via investors, but some small-scale green shoot opportunities for small local-interest businesses. The big corporates will survive, but with job losses and a general contraction. Medium-sized businesses and wannabe-unicorn gamble startups will be hit hardest. (Some will be ok. Many won't.)

[1] You might expect it to grow, but supply chains are going to be damaged and most people are going to have less money. Some people will have no money at all. Selected narrow sectors may buck the trend.

[2] Because there won't be a lot of other obvious places to invest. Also, everyone loves a bit of drama and optimism.

Tourism and travel will resurge in 2021, when people who missed this year's vacation (i.e. everyone) will book for the next summer.

Unemployed people typically don't take vacations. People that are nervous about their financial future also don't take vacations. The people that do are going to take less extravagant ones. I have a lot of friends in the travel industry, and no one there expects travel to return to what is was a few months ago for many years.

> "missed this year's vacation (i.e. everyone)"

How many people in the US do you think take vacations every year?

10 million filed for unemployment benefits in the last 2 weeks. They wont' be champing at the bit to spend money on luxuries anytime soon.

lol people are not rational spenders. Once they begin receiving any sort of stable income, they will bank on receiving it and splurge.

Which is a good thing for the rest of, ironically and economically.

Tourism industry is sized for population that does take vacations, and they were denied it this year. And out of 10 million on unemployment, how many you think were taking regular vacations in the first place? The poorest were hit the hardest.

Not me. I'm bracing for my own expected layoff and I imagine a lot of HNers are as well.

> fintech

Not at all. Wall Street will be just fine, as it has been in previous economic crashes.

Because it already has? This week has been brutal at nearly every start up I know, 30-50% layoffs have been the norm for most companies I've seen. Granted engineers are probably getting cut at a smaller percent than other roles, but they're in there.

Anyone who has worked in industry awhile can also attest to the fact that more recent years the drive to make every company a "tech" company has lead to a large amount of unnecessary engineering hires. Companies are rushing to build out more and more stuff, but very little of that is really deriving any value.

Tech people were really very lucky in the last recession as Tech started to boom just as everything else started to really feel it.

There's kind of a resume gap there between 2001 and 2020.

He was engineer, senior engineer, and then cto at active campaign..

Disgusting prevarication in an attempt to sell the idea that it's perfectly natural for the world to balance on a knife edge of investor confidence. Don't swallow it.

The tech situation in y2k vs today is incredibly different which makes them somewhat hard to compare. E-commerce was minuscule, telemedicine didn’t exist, social media wasn’t a thing as we know it today, ridesharing didn’t exist, cloud computing wasn’t a thing. It seems highly unlikely that we will regress to a state where such services are not required.

I graduated at the height of the dot com era and haven't made it - you may too.

Things will get better but the complete lack of a social safety net here is completely ridiculous.

The hoarding of capital by the super rich and business elites is disgusting. There are better and more ethical ways to structure out economy.

Agreed. This should be grounds for declaring “trickle down economics” disproved and downright bankrupt. How many times do we need to see stock buybacks not help the problem while also not creating jobs? Or hospitals firing people for talking about life threatening work conditions? Or hospitals closing because treating covid patients isn’t profitable enough? Etc etc

My take on this - the guy's not boasting about accomplishments here, just trying to reassure some young people who will be feeling pretty anxious about their future. Why the hostility?

For one, the US just announced 6.61 million new unemployment filings last week to being their total to over 16 million over the last three. Meanwhile the stock market is on a rally this morning. I can’t emphasize enough how tone deaf that looks to me. I imagine those unemployed would feel pretty invisible and left out today in comparison.

But he's not saying "everything's currently super" he's saying "things are truly crappy right now but they will get better".

I don't see what's tone deaf there. He's pitching a message of long-term-reassurance at a time when many people might find that comforting - specifically the younger folks who've never seen cycles of down/up/down-again/up-again.

The fundamental lesson of the Great Depression was that there are no cycles. Being down does not mean a later upswing with certainty. That we haven’t had a GD since 1929 is in large part due to an ability to constantly grow markets with cheap oil energy and new markets. But more importantly the US had a lot of power and regulatory oversight to keep it from happening. All of that is no longer the case, and we’re in danger of having another GD that could be even bigger from some estimates. Normalization “arguments” are bad arguments that disallow the discussion of deeper and more worrisome arguments. That’s why this article shouldn’t be welcomed too warmly.

Stanford economist explanation: https://www.fastcompany.com/90486801/top-economist-the-1930s...

> due to an ability to constantly grow markets with cheap oil energy and new markets. But more importantly the US had a lot of power and regulatory oversight to keep it from happening. All of that is no longer the case

Growth: emerging markets have decades of gangbusters growth ahead of them. More people will exit extreme poverty than ever before in the coming decades. China will transition from middle income to rich in our lifetimes, introducing hundreds of millions of new rich country consumers.

Federal power and responsiveness: The fed expanded its balance sheet in a rather incredible and history-making way. The CARES act is one of the largest subsidies ever.

Cheap oil energy: POTUS is currently begging SA and Russia to increase the price of oil. Meanwhile, alternative energy sources get cheaper every year.

A GD is possible, but not for those reasons.

I also lived through the dotcom boom and bust and even remember the recession that impacted hardware vendors in the 90s. What we might see now is certainly more like dotcom than 2008.

Dotcom was a time that a lot of investment chased a lot of speculative business in technology which led to very high demand for anything looking even remotely like computer skills and paying them well plus stock options. It had to run out of steam and come tumbling down at some point, the end of Y2K was when it ran out of new coal and the steam stopped not long after that.

Investors then had to beat each other to the door. It impacted everyone in the industry but the first to go were the businesses not actually making money, then those who had clients which consisted of a lot of businesses not making money.

There were plenty of survivors, those who made money or those who could trim their expenses and make money or those who could make money out of helping others trim their expenses. People who worked for these kept their jobs. It also became easier for them to hire people. Pay was depressed, but it emptied out the industry from people who weren't actually that interested in or that good at technology.

I joked that those people who got themselves Microsoft certifications just for the dotcom salaries could go back to being real estate agents. That turned out to be bad joke.

What’s the basis for this recession being dotcom level for tech and engineers broadly?

It could be hard for startups because of lower consumer and enterprise demand, plus VC funding drying up, but that’s still hypothetical I guess.

It's likely to be dotcom level+ for all industries. At this point, casual and low level employees have been laid off, businesses are conserving cash and negotiating with their lenders.

This is not a financial recession, its a completely different beast. We are in uncharted waters of a connected global economy being affected globally by the pandemic.

The unemployment numbers are at least 10 million in the last 2 months for the US. Similar proportional numbers are applicable in all economies.

This is likely to continue for the next 6 months and is likely to have recurring volatility as areas relax or increase social distancing to protect life and maintain the health system.

Assuming best case of a vaccine being available for general use this time next year, it will take 3-6 months to roll out before things are back to "normal". So that's not until Q3 2021 at best.

In the meantime, we can hopefully have palliative and curative treatments for those infected and, with luck, the virus doesn't mutate sufficiently to cause lack of immunity to those who have survived infection.

We're about to test out MMT vs current supply side vs (neo-)Kensyian macroeconomics. World trade was already affected by the stupid and misguided US instigated tariff barriers.

In addition, we have to deal with the existing US mal-administration and the volatility of an election with all of the ridiculous nature of the way US states conduct their election process.

6.61 million new unemployment filings last week bringing the total to over 16.6 million.

The idea is that the economic effects will have ripples. Google depends on advertising dollars right? Do you think Disney is spending the same cash advertising Disney hotels right now?

It's a ripple effect. Movie theaters, bars, golf courses, gymborees, concert venues, wedding planners, travel agents, hair dressers, massage parlors, party supply stores, wedding dress stores, SAT prep centers go out of business first.

Then, home remodel contractors, flooring supply depots, life coaches, car dealerships, finacial advisors, nanny's, and more.

Then, advertising collapses slaying Google and Facebook.

And, finally, as the whole house of cards comes crashing down, people cancel Netflix.

I didn't graduate at all, and still made it. You can too!

It's funny how the author only concerned about YOUNG programmers worrying.

We all worry now. But I think someone with 10-20 years experience will be better off than someone with 5 months experience...it's better to fire all juniors and leave out a few seniors from a software engineering perspective. juniors are a long term investment and often cause more trouble than provide value.

Of course you will. Some jobs are more prone to periodic layoffs than others. STEM jobs are pretty safe compared to the people who work 9-5 in retail (the people who are actually suffering right now).

College degree is not really a factor in making it or not.

What bust? The stock market is surging. The economy is doing great! There's no economic downturn! Don't you know, stonks only go up?

The line I like - I decide to go to a job fair on campus, still feeling awful. - Don't do that with COVID19, you might end up killing the person who hired you, so when you show up for your first day, there might not be anyone to welcome you there.

Except the scale of the current crisis is more comparable with 1930 than 2000.

Let's not minimize the difficulty of graduating or coming-of-age in the midst of a recession based on the anecdotal evidence of a privileged few. That's basically inspiration porn.

The fundamentals of the economy are strong.

You graduated in one of the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years and made it. Excellent.

And that's before the survivor bias. "I won the lottery, you can too"

Survivorship bias. Our system is broken, humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure. Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...This will be another generation of hopeless dreamers lost in the looming financial depression.

Why is our antidote hope against the adversity of going against all the odds?. Congrats to those who made it but more recognition to those who failed and managed to overcome misery

> Our system is broken

Citation needed.

> humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure

Serious question - why? You state this as an objective fact with no argument for it.

> Failure [shouldn't] be hunger and homelessness

If you're smart about it, it isn't. What's wrong with saying "yes you should probably have savings to fall back on in case this doesn't work out?" What's wrong with saying "if you throw caution and all reasonableness to the wind and blow your life's savings trying to sell Amway products, your neighbor isn't going to be burdened with paying your bills while you look for another job?"

This might be the most HN on-brand comment I've ever seen

I think people are too quick to discount the importance of failure and feeling bad. If failing has no consequence, there will be far less motivation. However, in my opinion, this is a balance. Failure has to be sufficiently painful, but no more than that.

From the research I’ve done, two major items have made failure too painful: stagnant wages and rapidly inflating rent prices. People can no longer hold onto savings in case something doesn’t work because they barely make ends meet. Our system is inherently broken. We need unions, raises in minimum wage, worker strikes, etc. This is not going to be a generation of people going through economic hardship just because of the economy, but also because we are no longer willing to fight for each other.

How would unions help anything? Modern examples (such as teachers unions) seem to reward mediocrity and encourage paying into failing pensions

If unions were the cause of "mediocrity" then there should be better teaching in states that don't have teacher unions right?

Ranking of states without unions (2011) https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions...

Wisconsin after unions were removed (2017) https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/news/economy/wisconsin-act-...

How does unionization depress rising rent?

You don’t have savings just after graduation.

Also: thinking about these people helps the rest of us, the economy is extremely fragile because most people aren’t able to save (high rent+low wages) and have limited mobility.

I used to think all the SWEs getting paid well would make the world a better place because they were more capable of dealing with complex problems but comments like this make me question that.

> If you're smart about it, it isn't.

Citation needed.

Whether you have something to fall back on in the event of failure has a lot to do with where and whom you're born to. It's pretty difficult to have a fall back option as a kid from a poor coal mining town with 20% unemployment. If you move out west with no network and lose your job soon after, yes, you can find yourself hungry and homeless in short order.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, many of us are just one bout of extended unemployment or illness away from homelessness.

> without punishing failure

Why not punish failure?

1. Because most people fail a lot in a lot of things.

2. Because failure often doesn't depend on you, and extremely often is at least partially dependent on external factors and context.

3. Because it's not that useful (psychologically) as opposed to other engagement approahces.

4. Because it can and will be misused to punish those who are disfavorable to the punishing establishment.

and last but not least:

5. Because the social systems which need to be in place in order to punish failure, and the ethos necessary for the punishers and for legitimization of the punishers' concrete acts, are themselves repressive to the general populace and make life a worse experience for everyone.

>It's inhumane to oversee a system with the capability to feed and house its entire population and refuse to do so for procedural reasons. (Welfare gap, Section 8 waiting lists)

>The system does not dole out failure meritocratically, therefore the existence of a total failure state will mean earnest and reasonably industrious individuals will still fail by chance alone. (Rust belt)

>The official sanctioning of a failure state is the impetus for a black market safety net, where failure is precluded at the cost of rule of law. (Drug-dealing, prostitution, gang-controlled ghettoes)

It's a hole in the ship's hull.

If you do, it shouldn't be:

>Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...

What is failure?

Is it failure to deliver some social good, even if your financial costs exceed your income?

The system needs a reset.

Would you rather optimize for people succeeding or optimize for people not failing? They are not the same thing.

> to encourage success

Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by not-failing and being out of sight and out of mind, e.g. a plumbing installation. You don't think of your "daily plumbing success".

So, I'd say not success which should be encouraged, it is well-directed and well-applied effort.

PS - The plumbing example can well be adapted to nearly any pursuit, definitely including software.

> You don't think of your "daily plumbing success".

Initially I had to laugh at this one, but why not?

Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens.

I think one of the IT fields that is struggling with this is security, because the problem is most apparent there.

> Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens.

This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem.

I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information.

Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.

That's exactly the kind of best intentions that the road to hell is paved with.

You should look at statistics about how many countries are rising out of desperate poverty and joining the rich world. It's gotten so good that we've forgotten what desperate poverty even looks like.

That's unnecessarily rude. Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. The parallel still holds. Times will be hard relative to the recent peak, but compared to just about every other industry we'll still be pretty fat and happy.

I know that's pretty thin consolation for people who are struggling to find jobs while their classmates from one year before were the subject of bidding wars. It's not what I wanted to hear myself when I was struggling through the tech cull ten years before dot-com. But it's still true. If anyone washes out of the industry now it's probably not because of COVID-19.

OP is supposed to be a message of hope in dark times. Most people are more resilient than they realize. Software jobs will continue to increase over any time span longer than a year or two. We'll get through this. It's sad that so many here are trying to turn a positive message into a negative one.

> Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years.

In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.

> In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.

Teaching/Academia isn't a real job and can be replaced with the internet

Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?

It baffles me that you can even write "academia isn't a real job" while the entire planet is desperately hoping for biomedical breakthroughs. Almost all of the people working on COVID have advanced degrees; many of them work in academic labs.

As for teaching, if you want to be intubated by someone who once a post about it on Medium, well...best of luck.

What places and professions are you talking about? I'm genuinely curious. I've worked with programmers outside the US and Europe, and my impression was that programming was still one of the "easier" ways (in terms of training and credentials) to reach the upper economic strata.

Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from. Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs. It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company. That means you’re making a huge bet on their stock - the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively. I think one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth is that engineers talk about the fact that they are paid well. Folks in other industries are much quieter about it.

Software is one of the best paid and fastest growing fields that doesn't require a post-graduate degree plus years of resident/associate toil before you pay off those student loans and start getting ahead. Finance might be even better, but not everyone has the stomach for it. There are a lot of very unpleasant people and attitudes to deal with. A lot of the worst tech-bro-ism comes from contact with finance.

> the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively

That's not entirely true. The salary scale is way higher than other places. For example, just my salary at one of those companies is higher than my total comp at a company outside the circle, and I was well paid by any standard there.

> one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth

It's always possible to look up at people making even more, and feel like you're not paid well enough by comparison. But it's also worth considering the many times more people making less, compared to which we're very well paid indeed. For some of us, the empathy outweighs the envy.

I generally agree with you. But many people say that software engineering de facto pays the best without acknowledging other options. I also think opinions are colored by media and public opinion. I’ve met many, many investment bankers, and 98% of them are really nice people that I enjoy hanging out with. Fundamentally I think people need to examine their skill set and the work environment in which they thrive the most in order to pick a career that will be most fruitful with them.

The high-paying finance and big-law jobs are exceptionally competitive. You have to compare that to the pay at highly competitive jobs like at FANG, not just a bog-standard SWE job.

High-paying medical specializations take far more education than SWE does. You start your career at 30, not at 22 like SWEs do.

> Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from.

Because it basically is.

> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations.

Selected finance jobs aren't an industry, neither is “medicine in certain specializations”, neither is big law (law as a whole is an industry).

> It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company

To be incredibly highly paid within SWE, sure. SWE is still highly paid compared to the rest of the world outside of those firms, and an unusually accessible high-paying field, without any post-baccalaureate education requirement, or even a firm requirement for an in-field bachelor's degree.

Note that there are similar (and often much bigger) cliffs in other highly-paid industries (which your allusion to “big law” implicitly recognizes.)

> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs.

But the stress levels and amount of hours you have to put in for both finance and law are exponentially higher than being a SWE. I honestly can't remember the last time I had to work 60-70 hour weeks, non-stop for months on end as a developer. The amount of stress in those industries also pales in comparison to the stress of being a SWE.

Some kids graduating today took in 50k+ in loans because they heard how great the industry is like you said.

One thing that may be different here is that when we come out of this, there will be pent-up demand, for most industries and trades.

There will be some that will take a hit (the ones enjoying a surge now, like furniture, electronics, entertainment/distraction, PPE manufacturing, etc), but many categories will have pent up demand, some will recover slowly, some may never reach the levels we had before, still most I think will recover)

$35,000/yr for a BSc is the most well paid? It was a different kind of collapse in 2001, there was little demand or reliance on online services.

I think you missed the article's point: yes, over the last 20 years or so tech has been an awesomely-expanding career. But it sure didn't seem that way after the dot com bust or the Eleventh of September. I was around then, and it was terrible. That tech was awesome is the article's point.

I do not see any fundamental reason why tech will not continue to be an awesome career field. Software is still eating the world. Yeah, the economy is suffering right now. It will recover.

Would you please stop posting snark and flamebait to HN? You've been doing it for a long time, unfortunately. It breaks the site guidelines and destroys the intended spirit of this place, which is curious conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for policing rude hn comments, friend. (seems like that's all you're doing)

I'm afraid it's my job (I'm a moderator here). Unfortunately the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation feedback, so such comments are a necessary evil. In case it helps at all, they're more tedious to write than they are to read.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Do you sometimes think that instead of moderating bad behaviour, you're burying critisisms under the guise of rudeness, perpetuating the atmosphere in hn that seeps into (and from) the rest of the ecosystem?

Is there any content in this?

We should qualify “made it“

This is a logical fallacy

programmers are making it since the dawn of the field.

This is just a personal anecdote. It is the very definition of survivorship bias.

I don't disagree with the logic. But a bit... wet blanket, no? I’m having a good laugh imagining the motivational oomph that's lost when adding the caps below.

"To all the young programmers worrying about the uncertain job market, I promise things will get better FOR SOME OF YOU."

That’s what life is. There are no happy endings or do overs. It is only the raw truth of your circumstances. You can either look at that truth head on, or avert your eyes.

Ok then, you're doomed to failure. You have no hope of ever succeeding. Feel better?

Just one term: "survivorship bias"

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Survivorship_bias...

I would also add "self promotion" to the list.

I've seen a lot of comments like this and it is kinda missing the point of what the guy is trying to say.

He is saying "things look bad now, but things can get better".

Site not available for reading...

Start coops. New graduates typically produce billable projects that generate far more than they are paid.

If you can’t read a hopeful, personal story without screaming “Survivorship Bias” and plunging headfirst into self-victimhood, good luck with the rest of your life!

I completely agree. There are alot of new graduates looking at the world saying "I'm screwed". No you're not! I've survived the dot com bust as a DBA, and both recent oil busts while working in energy. You too, will be great if you're reading this. We need more hope, more love, more encouragement right now. Be a part of the solution instead of more doom and gloom (and criticism).

I read the article expecting there to be some inspirational story and the sour grapes were wrong, or some self-congratulatory mess not widely applicable to anyone and the sour grapes have a point...

I don’t really know what that was.

Right where you think the story described by the title would start, it just ends.

The title is pretty inspirational in a “everything will be ok.” sort of way, but then instead of “here’s why” or “here’s my hopeful story” it’s: “I got a job and 9/11 happened.”

And if it wasn’t for the dot com boom I don’t see why any part of that would be different.

I've coworkers who were fresh grads, have been great to work with, and graduated into an excellent job market, but still mirrored the short exposition at the start about struggling to get a job 3 months before graduation

Not everyone goes to an excellent school, and ends up being courted by Google...

Things got better, of course. We were doing pretty well until 2008, when we weren’t doing so well. Then we did pretty well again. That’s the nature of life, isn’t it? It oscillates, like a sine wave, like the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe in and out.

Call it intentional vagueness if you want, but I think the author's point is: this too shall pass. The particulars of the author's story are likely so specific as to be useless.

There are ups, there are downs. Keep calm, and carry on.

I think that’s kind of my point though.

> There are ups, there are downs. Keep calm, and carry on.

That’s pretty much the title and subheading

The author’s story ends up not really adding any meat to that statement though.

They delve into their own story and I wouldn’t say there were any ultra specific Hail Mary moments that make it inapplicable to others (like people who’s stories are “I was sad then I won the lottery so that could be you”)

But it’s just, you go in expecting the author’s point to be expanded upon, and it just isn’t.

I actually read it like 3 times imagining I was missing something honestly

The author’s story ends up not really adding any meat to that statement though.

Yeah, but it sure helps their SEO rankings. XD

Yeah, actually I think that’s what was so weird

It’s like high-effort clickbait, which is an oxymoron of sorts

And remember, the sour apples posting all that with their personal anecdotes are biased as well.

It's hard to get a job. Make all the excuses you like. But Somebody is working, and it could be you.

Seems cruel to say that to a young person who is struggling with a serious issue. Lots of people graduate from college without coping mechanisms tuned to the realities of adult life ... including you perhaps? Maybe it would be better to just say that things are rarely as bad as they seem and the world will continue to need young, enthusiastic programmers despite any economic downturn.

Can't both you and GP be right?

He's not wrong, he's just being mean about it.

Definitely could have been worded with less derision. Apologies.

I am the child of a “mixed marriage” from a poor family that faced a lot of real adversity. The worst thing anyone could have done for me was to encourage the idea that I was a victim of circumstances. You don’t develop coping mechanisms without adversity. Adversity is a good thing so long as it’s not perpetual.

You're absolutely right. But you don't need to add anything extra to the adversity by being mean. People are perfectly capable of generating enough suffering for themselves to grow as a person without help from someone else.

Saying nonsense such as "textbook survivorship bias" whenever anyone succeeds at anything is a tragic coping mechanism for some small subset of HN commenters.

(Although I'm surprised you weren't downvoted into oblivion.)

"and you will too" is a big part of why this is the accurate TLDR.

I looked at the job market a few months ago and Carona aside, the market is in a terrible state. Companies are looking for unicorns that agree with them on style, chose all the right techs four years ago, are young or otherwise willing to accept abuse, and write like someone with 10 years experience teaching TDD style programming. On top of that they want you to agree that they have chosen a profitable business that will save the world.

One advantage of an economy like this is that in another year or two, companies will have been humbled a bit and will not be looking so far up the corporate equivalent of Maslow's hierarchy, and will either be more focused on things that actually matter, or will be dead.

Unfortunately, we have to get through this bit first....

I hope you are right. OTOH, with an actual over abundance of labor instead of always on hiring barely finding enough employees, they can either go even farther in the direction of pointless hoops or even shorter on wages relative to output.

My advice to everyone who is thinking about tech is to find a domain that needs tech assistance and consider that domain your career future. Street smart engineers I know have mostly dropped out by 40, so tech is not a career.

That's fine, but the title of the post literally contains "you will too". The author isn't only presenting an anecdote, they're making a claim that it applies to other's situations too. So I think it's fair game to call it out for being a single data point and not really relevant to anything that's happening right now.

Is it really that hard to distinguish reassuring rhetoric from a scientific claim?

Like, if you got laid off and your friend said "Hey man, it'll be ok" do you demand a peer reviewed study proving it?

You know, at this point, I probably would. But I'm a depressed person about to graduate into the middle of what looks an awful lot like the end of the world as we know it, so...

It'll probably be fine in another couple of months. It's just difficult to know for sure and payroll obligations are tough to roll back.

> Is it really that hard to distinguish reassuring rhetoric from a scientific claim?

Nope.

For instance, if you can differentiate survivorship bias (which this fails to even reach up to) from a valid statement supported by objective evidence, you have, in fact, literally distinguished mere reassuring rhetoric from a scientific claim.

Still missing the point.

Some statements are intended to inspire you to influence the future for the better, not to provide "valid statements supported by objective evidence" to describe the present. Further, there are no valid statements that can be guaranteed to accurately describe the future because it hasn't happened yet. The choices you make and the attitude you embrace will in some part determine what that is.

I can read a hopeful, personal story without screaming survivorship bias.

OTOH, I can't read a generalization about the fate of others supported only by a a hopeful, personal story without screaming...“unwarranted generalization from personal experience”. To even rise to the level of survivorship bias, it’d have to be based on others experiences, but distorted by the relative visibility of the successful examples.

None of this has anything to do with self-victimhood, as I'm not in the graduating-into-the-current-situation group at whom the unwarranted generalization is directed.

HA! This made me smile.

Not a useful comment on my part, but it's nice to know when you're appreciated. :)

Guilty. That is, in fact, exactly what I screamed--but in my head, so as to not disturb anybody.

Thanks for the good luck wishes. I could really use some.

classic case of survivor bias

Anecdotal and not universal.

I thought so too - if you're solidly upper middle class, then you'll usually stay solid upper middle class. The author went to Loyola Uni, a private US uni, which according to this site at least is 50% more expensive than the national average non-profit uni [1], indicating a well-off background. Wealth begets wealth in form of connections, which is what the author shortly refers to:

>I do know someone who works at Loyola, whose husband works at a real estate company. They need a database programmer.

So yeah, if you're 'outside' these groups/classes, chances are you may not make it.

[1]https://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/illinois/loyola-univers...

> The author went to Loyola Uni, a private US uni, which according to this site at least is 50% more expensive than the national average non-profit uni [1], indicating a well-off background

Your conclusion isn't necessarily wrong, but many private universites offer fairly good financial aid packages for students whose families wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. At the university I went to, there were definitely a lot of upper middle class students, but plenty who weren't as well; one of my good friends there actually didn't end up having to pay any tuition due to his family having fairly limited income (his father was a part time construction worker, and his mother couldn't work due to health issues). That's not to say that there weren't other advantages for students who came from more connected backgrounds, but attending a private university with a high cost isn't necessarily limited to only those from higher-income families.

I like this kind of articles. I graduated during the 2008 crash and thrived as a programmer. It is probably because i spent most of my youth on IRC learning about all sorts of topics, mostly web related, while others waited for knowledge to be handed down by professors. If you are passionate you are likely to gain deep knowledge about your topic of interest. Deep knowledge makes you highly desirable for most employers. Anyone sitting out there anxious about what may be, now is the time to sink deep into your domain and become better at it.

> Deep knowledge makes you highly desirable for most employers. Anyone sitting out there anxious about what may be, now is the time to sink deep into your domain and become better at it.

Is this not more risky during a recession, when you're niche may not be very desirable in the economic climate?

Thats a good question - but I dont think it would me more risky than being anxious. Ideally one would chose a domain likely to be in demand.

Anyone thinking of starting a company to see if this idea is viable? Asking for a friend

https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/devs

This is much worse than the dotcom bust. Unless you were working for an unprofitable company that depended on VC funding or a company that was profitable only because it was dependent on startups (ie Yahoo) you were fine. There were still plenty of jobs out there. In 2000, I had been working for three years and was looking for my second job and there were plenty of opportunities in corporate America.

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