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
> 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.
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.
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'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.
“ 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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] seisvelas|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] __s|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scraggz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] complianceowl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreilys|6 years ago|reply
Also known as survivorship bias.
[+] [-] adtac|6 years ago|reply
I have a friend who recently got his MSFT joining RSUs at $130 a few weeks ago.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goldenchrome|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebean11|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfshaw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vecter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|6 years ago|reply
(FYI I bought MSFT stock for half that, back in 2017.)
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NeutronStar|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] austincheney|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] agentultra|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nsgi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsanr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] meowzero|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mywittyname|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aluminussoma|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wolco|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bambataa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ninetyfurr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffmunn|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elorant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheelerwj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shahbaby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzeroracer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anticsapp|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chvid|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxter001|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todaysAI|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerhackernews|6 years ago|reply
The hoarding of capital by the super rich and business elites is disgusting. There are better and more ethical ways to structure out economy.