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Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

Which young people have never seen recession?

Early 2020 there was a covid recession

2007/2008 there was a severe "recession" (depression)

Compared to 2001 & 2008, the 2020 recession was a blip on the radar. I graduated high school in 2009. My entire adult life to this point has been in a prosperous economy. COVID felt "different" (it was a pandemic, 100 year event kind of thing) to now. These layoffs have me worried for my family and what it could mean for our future.

2009 was not a prosperous economy. The economy was quite bad until late 2011.

You started off your adult life in a pretty bad recession.

Maybe college insulated you from that.

2020 was shorter than 2001 - but MUCH worse. 2001 wasn't very bad unless you worked in tech in The Bay or invested your life savings in Internet meme stocks.

It really is amusing to see how much HN thinks that times are tough right now and the talk of the current economic conditions as a recession. It seems like the majority of HN weren't graduated from college in 2008 yet or else they've somehow managed to forget what that was like or just weren't paying enough attention. And the ones that just found it hard to get a job out of college probably weren't watching the stock market closely and don't seem to remember how bad things got after the Bush administration let Lehman collapse and when we nearly "broke the buck" and Congress had to act to prevent a total financial collapse. We have 3.5% unemployment right now, not 6% and rising 0.4% every month.

At the same time nobody seems to be paying attention to how rapidly the Fed raised rates this time compared to the build-up to 2006-2008, and while everyone talks about low rates for over a decade caused malinvestment nobody seems to be doing the very obvious math of what is going to happen when higher rates destroy it all.

Because HN is basically filled with Boomers at this point, maybe most commentators don't realize that there are different segments of young people.

Those who were in the Class of 2020 and above got FUCKED big time hiring wise.

Those who were in the Class of 2008-2011 got FUCKED big time hiring wise.

Everyone who started their career between 2012-2019 (like me) have had an amazing ride. We could jump companies at the drop of a hat and 1.5x-2x our TC, stocks were constantly rallying, and it is this group that started to enter middle management and/or build startups with YC. And it is this group that has never experienced a real recession.

PS. What is happenning in tech right now is nowhere near a recession. I've seen the stress my parents had during the Dot Com Bust and 2008. What's happening right now is nowhere near that bad.

And hopefully it won't get anywhere near dot bomb levels for tech.

I was very lucky to find a new (lower paying) position during that era and the company I joined subsequently barely got through some of the aftermath. But I knew a lot of people from technology companies who basically got out of the industry and, for at least some of them, their careers/finances never really recovered.

Amen to that!

At least talking to people who went through 2001 and 2008, it looks like there are more opportunities across the board now. If you got laid off from $randomYCStartup as a SWE or SRE, you can still land a decent paying IC role at one of the 100s of upper market companies that exist. BoA, Honeywell, Target, etc are still hiring SWEs and paying decent salaries, as are the hundreds of upper market B2B tech companies (eg. Okta, Meraki, Oracle, etc). It may not seem sexy like working at Google or Meta, but it ain't a bad living either. Sadly, a lot of my peers have this sense of hubris that anything less than FAANG or a late stage startup spending tens of millions of dollars in PR is career suicide, which is honestly stupid in an industry as skill oriented as ours

I graduated from Software Engineering in 2001. Doing a 3 year postgrad degree was one of the best options work-wise at that dark time. We are not that deep, for now, at this time.

Fortunately, I never needed to come up with a Plan B as I fairly quickly landed a job with someone I knew at a small competitor of the the company I was laid off from (which was still doing OK although that changed). But I never got so much as a nibble from anyone else.

Fibber Magees, Mountain View (now St. Stephen's Green). Out of work people in tech at the pub at 2 in the afternoon. On their right, a beer. On their left, a pager that isn't buzzing (hoping for a message from a recruiter).

Talking to the guy who got a job serving gelato next door and a guy who is about to start work 3rd shift at Blockbuster as a cashier. They've got masters degrees in CS but when the company closed up quickly, they had to find a job quickly that paid some of their bills (rent in Mountain View wasn't cheap).

Those were not happy times.

I was fortunate. My manager had previously worked at Apple in the bad years and at the first signs of future possible problems had gotten two open reqs for our team approved all the way up the chain to the C level. While the reqs were approved she really dragged her feet on writing up the job position and after a bit, HR got tired (I presume) asking her and then we had a hiring freeze and well, that was the end of that... except that we had two C level approved reqs that were unfilled. Then contractors weren't renewed... and then contracts were ended early. When the layoff happened she was told to lay off two people from a team of four. She laid off the open reqs and pointed out that if the director levels were to force her to lay off some from the team, she would immediately rehire them back in to those open reqs. So, our team survived intact. That was 2001. However, in 2009 she wasn't my manager anymore (and had gone to do other things).

> Because HN is basically filled with Boomers at this point

Have anything to back that up?

Gut feeling and general tone. I'm Gen Z and the way people talk on this forum is tonally and syntactically different from my cohort. Also, ime, most early career peeps prefer subreddits to HN - HN has a bit of a smartass/toxic quality to it that has turned off just about every friend of mine below 27 who I've tried to evangelize HN to. Also, down the grapevine at least, most YC people don't really use HN anymore - they have their own private Founder Board that they prefer perusing now.

Well millennials aren't boomers, but I agree Gen Z is a minority here. Reddit also has "smartass/toxic" covered but I'd welcome any subreddit suggestions.

Them's boomer talk /s

There has been a semantic shift with the word boomer - for older people it means the baby boomer, but for much younger people (like Gen Z) it just means anyone 30 or above.

For dumber people it means that, not for younger people.

Younger is not a synonym for dumber.

There are young people who look up words and use them correctly, and there are old people who just ape other people's random shifts and misuses of a word in order to fit in.

You can't really moralize linguistic drift. By that standard your usage of "dumber" is grammatically incorrect with the 19th century English usage of the word Dumb. Language changes, grow up.

You appear to be correct, didn't even notice it happened guess I am boomer.

It's not genuine linguistic drift. You and few people have your own meaning for widely used term (which you're entitled to have), and you're knowingly using that meaning in a situation where you know you are not surrounded by those people.

You made a comment elsewhere in the thread saying that HN was full of boomers.

Now it is clear you just actually meant people over thirty, which makes it true. Your usage of "boomer" has not yet passed into the main stream; it is not comparable to "dumb". Google Books easily finds a 1930's reference for the usage of someone "getting dumber and dumber".

I'm not moralizing, by thew way; dumber isn't a moral flaw. (By the mainstream definition of moral; maybe you have your own version of that too).

> Your usage of "boomer" has not yet passed into the main stream; it is not comparable to "dumb".

Hate to break it to you, but it passed into the mainstream years ago.

Are you emulating the way people write in this forum? Because I'm not detecting those syntactic differences in your own posts. It looks like normal English to me.

Yep. How I write on HN is different from how I write in Twitter or Reddit.

The boomers were born just after WW2. Most of them are going to be 60+ and many are going north of 70. I highly doubt the majority of HN are that old, or even a large segment (33% or more).

Gonna be a lot of Gen X and Millennials, probably a disproportionate number of < 35 tech bros

As I commented above,

There has been a semantic shift with the word boomer - for older people it means the baby boomer, but for much younger people (like Gen Z) it just means anyone 30 or above.

>Because HN is basically filled with Boomers at this point, maybe most commentators don't realize that there are different segments of young people.

Generalizing 'boomers' as over 30 and giving a lecture about it while at the same time complaining about people not recognizing segments of other generations is an amusing lack of self-awareness.

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