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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing.

Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill. Over the long term these things tend to sort themselves out but in the short term yeah sometimes stuff is not “fair.” The “up” market in tech went on for so long that many forgot what a down market is and many have never experienced one.

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> A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing.

Can confirm. I was putting myself through school and when my programming job went away it was a complete life reset. I didn't get back on track with my peers until about a decade later. It's also had the added effect that I'm very risk conscious and save aggressively. I am always looking for the next down market.

> Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill

After saying all that, I'm not a fan of this saying at all. There is something to being in the right place at the right time, but it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs. You do need to work very hard both for interviews and on-going work. You'll inevitably do some soul sacrificing whether you realize it or not.

All that to say, it's a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but the luck isn't to be forgotten.

Luck favors the prepared and all that.

I have been very lucky at two particular points in my career where I really needed a new job and I found one both times with one email (including one in 2001!). Which was very lucky. But the emails were also to people I had worked with in the past and had a good relationship with.

Fair call out on the luck thing and yes the old adage of the harder I work the luckier I get is very true.

> it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs.

Not true. There are many avenues to it. The most important is deliberate training to be a top engineer. I know several who got into top tech jobs. All of them were no-brainers to hire, because of their track records.

I'm not sure if you realize how what you said looks, but I clearly cut the whole college thing early. Studying the required math for programming, even leaving out DS&A, is very hard. It's a lot of book reading, not a lot of hand holding, and self learners will probably have to learn the same thing many times over. That's to say, the deliberate training is exactly what I was speaking to from my own experience.

Perhaps I misinterpreted your statement. I inferred it meant that getting into a top tech job was due to luck, and so it's a long shot lucky chance (like winning the lottery).

The other meaning is it isn't luck to get a top tech job.

Ah, that is a misinterpretation. I said there's a little bit of luck involved, but it's mostly hard work. I even regarded it as a bit of soul sacrificing.

That doesn't make sense. Deliberate training to reach a goal sounds like the opposite of lucking into achieving a goal to me.

Yeah. The article makes the point that, while it's true that in "tech" things may look a bit like dot-bomb with layoffs and offers being rescinded, it's (so far) a pretty good employment market overall. And going to work for the government or a big bank may be disappointing to many but it's not the worst thing in the world.

yeah, and then that was the start of the huge mobile, cloud, app boom that followed. So many people got hugely rich with ESOs from the bull market that followed, or with IPOs or other exits. A small setback in 2022 does not change the long-term picture of FANMG tech jobs having among the best prospects of probably any job or sector. A lot of people on reddit have retired 'FIRE style' with 7 figures with such jobs.

My job for the past 10+ years with a medium-sized tech company pretty much fundamentally changed my financial situation even given salary and stock appreciation that was nothing extraordinary.

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