It’s going to be all about cash flow. If you’re burning cash and not making much of it from operations then it’s going to be a bumpy road ahead. Buckle up.
Indeed. I lived through both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2000 dot com implosion (also graduated high school and went off to college right during the 1991 recession). People who entered the job market after 2015 and know nothing except recruiters constantly hitting them up with mid six figure+ job offers are in for a rude awakening IMO.
I can't see the future but I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath like the .com crash. Engineers in particular are valuable assets for a company and expensive to recruit. Expect companies to cut back on perks and possibly raises for awhile if it gets bad. But I don't think we're going to see massive layoffs across the board.
There's still a ton of money in the VC world. They just aren't spending right now.
The world has gone ever more dependent on tech since then. Tech is used everywhere now, pervasively.
They're not re-introducing cash in cash-free economies. People aren't going back to carrying physical documents around and stashing them in high cabinets. Shopping online has only gotten more popular. Hanging out online, too. Agriculture, warfare, industry, you name it... it's not all "Uber, but for %s" out there. Somebody has to keep the lights on, right?
I agree. I've went through .com and the gfc, and key to both times was to make sure the company I was with was making money. While I think tech will see downward pressures on salaries, each company will be in a different situation. For example, if you're in a company that needs a runway, assume it may get cut short at any time. I expect the big techs who are making money to start scooping up some of the people cut from VC companies which is where the downward wage pressure will come from.
The other side that is very different from both .com and the gfc, is that engineers are seen as assets even outside of tech companies now. Almost every company views tech as a competitive edge, and that is simply not going away. Salaries may level off and/or pull back some, but there is too much technology deployed to stop hiring completely.
I hope you're right. In my experience, most large companies see tech as a cost center.
That sentence seems inherently contradictory.
...and yet all the stuff being built by and large makes users less sophisticated as consumers and their 'technological literacy' questionable. At no point in the last 3 decades, and no one moving forward currently, has shown any interest in making the masses use SQL for anything at an administrative level, and users have shown ever less interest in how any of the tech works, or what it can do, as long as it fulfills whatever prima facie use case they care about.
as a developer you know perfectly well that as you become more sophisticated you can do much more using much simpler tools.
i don't think you people have any idea of the kind of environment into which your software is deployed. you're mostly happy to ship any crap that will superficially justify the infinite expansion of bloatware that you get paid to produce.
That might be generally the case (and certainly historically true) but that has been changing for the last decade (disclosure, I worked in CRM for a decade and that was very much position taken internally, "focus on actual users at least as much as any upstream stakeholder" especially as mobile started to really take off).
"the categories of technical competence and social awareness are not supposed to intersect."
Not supposed to, or avoided by certain folks in order to expand a customer base to the biggest L in the LCD acronym possible?
not supposed to, as in, a majority of industry stakeholders have (apparently, based on their behavior) strong motivations to mystify technology to themselves and others, to represent maintenance as innovation, and so on, because disruption and innovation are the standards we've set for ourselves.
in the meantime, we have such disasters happening as js-dependent archive.org. how can this be tolerated?
i certainly believe that your company's internal position was to "focus on users" but the truth is that managing the flaws of overengineered systems in practice takes up a huge amount of administrators' time, and they develop no competencies as a result, so it is pure wasted time. most of them have no idea that there exists a relatively simple language for looking up student data. no one has ever told them "there exists a simple way of saying 'give me a list of all the students who failed calculus last year'" or whatever. lots of them still have to navigate ancient terminal applications, and all the people who could theoretically be helping these organizations reorganize themselves and use technology better are making very big salaries just selling them overengineered software instead.
since the software is bloated and breaking the web, the organization also ends up upgrading its hardware frequently, so all the ancient contracts with dell and cisco and whatever keep grinding, and as a result video games look prettier and the military has more targeting computers and surveillance devices, and the developer class gets paid to… what? invest in real estate, vr equipment, and an illusion of progress?
Actually I am. I've worked both sides of the problem (and in that regard I agree its a problem), and see deficits on both, hence a different opinion, but thanks for the condescension and presumptive dismissal, as I now know about what further effort to devote to this conversation, which ends at the following period.
I think you're right, but I also think that we'll see a more general downturn than the .com crash was. Most people outside of tech didn't feel the .com crash. I suspect we're in for a recession that's closer to the '08 crash which means it's going to take a while to come back.
This is terrible advice. An employment gap will make you radioactive to hiring managers during a recession. Even a terrible job will keep you in better standing for negotiation.
I’d rather have a 4-6 month gap than taking on a bad job right away.
But you do have a valid point that it’s easier to find a job when you have one.
2) Keep some of your portfolio liquid
3) Prepare to hunker down at your current job for awhile (lose the job hopping mindset for the time being if you have it)
On the other hand, consider that the time immediately after a recession passes can be a great time to do something new, start a business, etc. as you will be getting in early on the next business cycle.
I just got a pretty good offer and I don't know what to do - I am a bit worried I will be the first to be downsized if things go south. The company seems to be doing well and has IPO'ed so there's that. On the other hand no one can guarantee that my current startup won't struggle in the coming year or two.
2) Set aside some cash as an emergency fund: 3-6 months worth of spending is a good idea.
3) Set up automatic monthly investments in an index fund (ideally in a tax-advantaged account such as an IRA or 401k if you're in the US)
I saw the dot com bubble burst, and then made it through a round of layoffs in early 2k, and again near 2008.
I saw people lose their homes, go bankrupt, and end up in bad positions. It really scarred me, to the extend where I won't work at a company that doesn't actually make something of value, or doesn't have an existing line of profit. I don't consider stock options when taking a position, since it's very rare they actually end up being worth anything significant, even with a buyout. I live well within my means so I can take a salary that's 1/2 and be ok, if needed.
But, as the counter, you could easily, and rightly, claim that this has caused me to not make a significant amount of money by taking these less risky positions. Those risky positions pay more because they are risky, and everyone knows it.
I vaguely recall a factoid from a recruiter during a round of interviewing at Google about 15 years ago, where some crazy percentage of the current employees had been fresh-from-college hires in the last 2-3 years. I understood there was some churn in the valley, but could not quite imagine how many were fresh hires from school versus more senior folks on their next stint.
For years afterward there were people who had mentally anchored themselves at a certain salary bracket that couldn't find anything (especially in Ottawa) that paid anywhere close.
I always assumed this will happen any time with machine learning, I don't think it will be as bad for software overall though.
But they were right.
Look at how the telecoms industry looks now compared to the heights of 2003 or so.
It's not a "big if" at all. Zero nominal rates and negative real rates are an anomaly in economic history over the last few centuries. Rates are headed higher, much higher. The Fed has been holding off in the hope that inflation would be "transitory" but it's now been a year and a half of >7% CPI increases with no sign of abating.
I'd still argue there is sizable "if" as one way to reduce government debt would be to use inflation (just like in the 1950s). So while rates will go up, the question is how much they will go up and if the level they reach will be high enough to cause substantial portfolio reallocations.
I don’t see VC/PE investment dropping as a percent of investments since it’s a unique high risk/high return investment than 5% bonds can’t match.
Nominal means nothing.
What happened in 2000 was that interest rates got up and money became scarcer, so there was nobody willing to put any money into more risky investments like VCs.
Today we are in a completely different realm of money availability, but it is becoming scarcer again.