18 ms·

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

357 points by loumal 7y ago

adreamingsoul 7y ago
College degree is not really a factor in making it or not.
anonytrary 7y ago
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).
adtac 7y ago
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.
- redisman 7y ago
  Finding a job in the middle of a recession is financially incredible
  - adjkant 7y ago
    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.
    - sysbin 7y ago
      Recruitment spamming isn't useful for accessing hiring rate. Recruiters are always building their database of who is out there and gathering information.
      - adjkant 7y ago
        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.
        sysbin 7y ago
        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.
- sfshaw 7y ago
  Your friend figured out how to time the market. Amazing.
  - dempseye 7y ago
    His parents were the ones who really showed foresight.
    - autonoshitbox 7y ago
      No, his grandparents were. Actually...
      - krustyburger 7y ago
        I think we can all agree that it was the first aquatic organism that bravely oozed onto dry land.
        irrational 7y ago
        The primordial soup would like a word.
        DonHopkins 7y ago
        Julia Child had a great recipe for Primordial Soup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... Also a great recipe for shark repellent, that she made for the CIA. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/shark-repellent.html https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/... And she showed how to bone a chicken Saturday Night Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ
        arcticbull 7y ago
        Uh, I think reddit is leaking
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I hear winning the lottery is also financially incredible.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Don't count your chickens before they vest, in 6 months somebody might be getting them at $90
  - yaitsyaboi 7y ago
    Yea, but who has more time for the market to swing back up than a 22 year old?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      A 21 year old.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    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.
  - adtac 7y ago
    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.
    - foota 7y ago
      Isn't the favorable tax treatment only on the appreciation from the vest price?
      - adtac 7y ago
        Ah I'm not too sure. That might be the case.
- goldenchrome 7y ago
  That's not that financially incredible. That's the price that MSFT was at less than a year ago.
  - quickthrower2 7y 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.
    - jlmorton 7y ago
      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.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        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/ https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
        Retric 7y ago
        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.
        arcticbull 7y ago
- kccqzy 7y ago
  This might be off topic but why is the initial grant much more important than refreshers?
  - foghornleghorn 7y ago
    most rank and file get next to nothing for refreshers.
- vecter 7y 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.
- NeutronStar 7y ago
  Or, as OP said, 17 years after graduating in programming, you should have a job. There. Success!!
- icedchai 7y ago
  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.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
wheelerwj 7y ago
Financial crisis is nothing new to the current working generation. We're getting kind of good at it I think..
- shahbaby 7y ago
  Sometimes I feel like my entire life is just one crisis after another. You do get used to it after awhile.
- taurath 7y ago
  It’s been every 7-8 years for me for my entire life. I find it very difficult to make large bets.
  - asdff 7y ago
    If you'd been betting along the market you'd be up big by now
- rchaud 7y ago
  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.
geoffmunn 7y ago
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.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  I imagine its worse now with the Student debt bubble - too many people with 100k in student loans.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    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.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    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.
    - foota 7y ago
      I'd like to see the distribution curve, I know a number of "normal" (i.e., not terrible irresponsible) people with significantly more.
      - 7y ago
Afforess 7y ago
The fundamentals of the economy are strong.
neenaks 7y ago
We should qualify “made it“
black_13 7y ago
Anecdotal and not universal.
- a_bonobo 7y ago
  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-university-chicago/ https://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/illinois/loyola-univers...
  - saghm 7y ago
    > 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.
adultSwim 7y ago
Start coops. New graduates typically produce billable projects that generate far more than they are paid.
ninetyfurr 7y ago
All of a sudden my unsexy junior dev job at shitcorp isn't so bad.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  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.
- foepys 7y ago
  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.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  I was gearing up to switch companies Q1. That plan is definitely getting shelved for now.
taurath 7y ago
What’s the basis for this recession being dotcom level for tech and engineers broadly?
- tarsinge 7y ago
  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.
- rswail 7y ago
  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.
  - ianai 7y ago
    6.61 million new unemployment filings last week bringing the total to over 16.6 million.
- copenja 7y ago
  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.
Yhippa 7y ago
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.
adjkant 7y ago
Anyone thinking of starting a company to see if this idea is viable? Asking for a friend https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/devs https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/devs
n0tme 7y ago
It's funny how the author only concerned about YOUNG programmers worrying.
- joelbluminator 7y ago
  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.
Animats 7y ago
There's kind of a resume gap there between 2001 and 2020.
- shippery 7y ago
  He was engineer, senior engineer, and then cto at active campaign..
wllknj 7y ago
This is just a personal anecdote. It is the very definition of survivorship bias.
- raleighm 7y ago
  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."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    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.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Ok then, you're doomed to failure. You have no hope of ever succeeding. Feel better?
todaysAI 7y ago
I graduated at the height of the dot com era and haven't made it - you may too.
aluminussoma 7y ago
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.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  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.
  - tomppa 7y ago
    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.
dschuetz 7y ago
I didn't graduate at all, and still made it. You can too!
wolco 7y ago
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.
- bambataa 6y ago
  Wow, giving you hate for a decision they made. A couple founder team is a red flag for me.
pm90 7y ago
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.
TheDesolate0 7y ago
This is a logical fallacy
elorant 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anticsapp 7y ago
  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.
andarleen 7y ago
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.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > 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?
  - andarleen 7y ago
    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.
Qahlel 7y ago
classic case of survivor bias
fzeroracer 7y ago
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.
- frockington1 7y ago
  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
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
chvid 7y ago
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.
- wcoenen 7y ago
  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-thousands-of-employees-as-revenue-drops-by-over-50/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/08/indias-oyo-furloughs-thous...
  - chvid 7y ago
    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?
    - wcoenen 7y ago
      > 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.
    - reroute1 7y ago
      Wtf are you talking about lol
- crispyporkbites 7y ago
  Everyone loses in a recession.
  - chvid 7y ago
droptablemain 7y ago
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.
uwagan 7y ago
programmers are making it since the dawn of the field.
brosinante 7y ago
You graduated in one of the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years and made it. Excellent.
- iso1631 7y ago
  And that's before the survivor bias. "I won the lottery, you can too"
- 533474 7y ago
  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
  - pc86 7y ago
    > 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?"
    - rsk67 7y ago
      This might be the most HN on-brand comment I've ever seen
    - nscalf 7y ago
      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.
scarface74 7y ago
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.
wolfgke 7y ago
Just one term: "survivorship bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Survivorship_bias&oldid=948047578 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Survivorship_bias...
- rumanator 7y ago
  I would also add "self promotion" to the list.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  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".
austincheney 7y ago
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.
- nsgi 7y ago
  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.
rpiguy 7y ago
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!
- heyflyguy 7y ago
  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).
  - BoorishBears 7y ago
    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...
    - cushychicken 7y ago
      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.
rchaud 7y ago
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.
- ianai 7y ago
  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.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Yep. I read it and thought I missed some pages, maybe accidentally scrolled down or something.
- catacombs 7y ago
  The article screams "privilege."
sillycube 7y ago
Site not available for reading...
brianmcc 7y ago
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?
- ianai 7y ago
  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.
  - brianmcc 7y ago
    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.
    - ianai 7y ago
      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-depression-was-great-this-one-might-be-greater https://www.fastcompany.com/90486801/top-economist-the-1930s...
      - 7y ago
cutler 7y ago
Except the scale of the current crisis is more comparable with 1930 than 2000.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
meowzero 7y ago
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.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  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.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    $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.
seisvelas 7y ago
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 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 7y ago
  > 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
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmd 7y ago
    > 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.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Is there any content in this?
anticsapp 7y ago
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.
cosmiccatnap 7y ago
I can accomplish X so there's no excuse for you not to accomplish Y. Ok man, whatever you say.
mcamaj 7y ago
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.
baxter001 7y ago
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.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
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?
kokey 7y ago
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.
kerhackernews 7y ago
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.
- ianai 7y ago
  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

357 points by loumal 7y ago

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

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).

adtac 7y ago

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.

redisman 7y ago
Finding a job in the middle of a recession is financially incredible
- adjkant 7y ago
  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.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    Recruitment spamming isn't useful for accessing hiring rate. Recruiters are always building their database of who is out there and gathering information.
    - adjkant 7y ago
      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.
      - sysbin 7y ago
        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.
sfshaw 7y ago
Your friend figured out how to time the market. Amazing.
- dempseye 7y ago
  His parents were the ones who really showed foresight.
  - autonoshitbox 7y ago
    No, his grandparents were. Actually...
    - krustyburger 7y ago
      I think we can all agree that it was the first aquatic organism that bravely oozed onto dry land.
      - irrational 7y ago
        The primordial soup would like a word.
        DonHopkins 7y ago
        Julia Child had a great recipe for Primordial Soup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... Also a great recipe for shark repellent, that she made for the CIA. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/shark-repellent.html https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/... And she showed how to bone a chicken Saturday Night Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        Uh, I think reddit is leaking
Waterluvian 7y ago
I hear winning the lottery is also financially incredible.
thebean11 7y ago
Don't count your chickens before they vest, in 6 months somebody might be getting them at $90
- yaitsyaboi 7y ago
  Yea, but who has more time for the market to swing back up than a 22 year old?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    A 21 year old.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  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.
- adtac 7y ago
  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.
  - foota 7y ago
    Isn't the favorable tax treatment only on the appreciation from the vest price?
    - adtac 7y ago
      Ah I'm not too sure. That might be the case.
goldenchrome 7y ago
That's not that financially incredible. That's the price that MSFT was at less than a year ago.
- quickthrower2 7y 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.
  - jlmorton 7y ago
    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.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      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/ https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
      - Retric 7y ago
        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.
        arcticbull 7y ago
kccqzy 7y ago
This might be off topic but why is the initial grant much more important than refreshers?
- foghornleghorn 7y ago
  most rank and file get next to nothing for refreshers.
vecter 7y 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.
NeutronStar 7y ago
Or, as OP said, 17 years after graduating in programming, you should have a job. There. Success!!
icedchai 7y ago
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.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

wheelerwj 7y ago

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

shahbaby 7y ago
Sometimes I feel like my entire life is just one crisis after another. You do get used to it after awhile.
taurath 7y ago
It’s been every 7-8 years for me for my entire life. I find it very difficult to make large bets.
- asdff 7y ago
  If you'd been betting along the market you'd be up big by now
rchaud 7y ago
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.

geoffmunn 7y ago

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.

tmpz22 7y ago
I imagine its worse now with the Student debt bubble - too many people with 100k in student loans.
- onion2k 7y ago
  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.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  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.
  - foota 7y ago
    I'd like to see the distribution curve, I know a number of "normal" (i.e., not terrible irresponsible) people with significantly more.
    - 7y ago

Afforess 7y ago

The fundamentals of the economy are strong.

neenaks 7y ago

We should qualify “made it“

black_13 7y ago

Anecdotal and not universal.

a_bonobo 7y ago
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-university-chicago/ https://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/illinois/loyola-univers...
- saghm 7y ago
  > 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.

adultSwim 7y ago

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

ninetyfurr 7y ago

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

Polylactic_acid 7y ago
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.
foepys 7y ago
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.
arvinsim 7y ago
I was gearing up to switch companies Q1. That plan is definitely getting shelved for now.

taurath 7y ago

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

tarsinge 7y ago
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.
rswail 7y ago
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.
- ianai 7y ago
  6.61 million new unemployment filings last week bringing the total to over 16.6 million.
copenja 7y ago
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.

Yhippa 7y ago

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.

adjkant 7y ago

Anyone thinking of starting a company to see if this idea is viable? Asking for a friend https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/devs https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/devs

n0tme 7y ago

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

joelbluminator 7y ago
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.

Animats 7y ago

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

shippery 7y ago
He was engineer, senior engineer, and then cto at active campaign..

wllknj 7y ago

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

raleighm 7y ago
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."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  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.
imgabe 7y ago
Ok then, you're doomed to failure. You have no hope of ever succeeding. Feel better?

todaysAI 7y ago

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

aluminussoma 7y ago

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.

Consultant32452 7y ago
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.
- tomppa 7y ago
  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.

dschuetz 7y ago

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

wolco 7y ago

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.

bambataa 6y ago
Wow, giving you hate for a decision they made. A couple founder team is a red flag for me.

pm90 7y ago

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.

TheDesolate0 7y ago

This is a logical fallacy

elorant 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
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anticsapp 7y ago
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.

andarleen 7y ago

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.

non-entity 7y ago
> 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?
- andarleen 7y ago
  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.

Qahlel 7y ago

classic case of survivor bias

fzeroracer 7y ago

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.

frockington1 7y ago
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
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

chvid 7y ago

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.

wcoenen 7y ago
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-thousands-of-employees-as-revenue-drops-by-over-50/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/08/indias-oyo-furloughs-thous...
- chvid 7y ago
  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?
  - wcoenen 7y ago
    > 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.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    Wtf are you talking about lol
crispyporkbites 7y ago
Everyone loses in a recession.
- chvid 7y ago

droptablemain 7y ago

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.

uwagan 7y ago

programmers are making it since the dawn of the field.

brosinante 7y ago

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

iso1631 7y ago
And that's before the survivor bias. "I won the lottery, you can too"
533474 7y ago
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
- pc86 7y ago
  > 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?"
  - rsk67 7y ago
    This might be the most HN on-brand comment I've ever seen
  - nscalf 7y ago
    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.

scarface74 7y ago

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.

wolfgke 7y ago

Just one term: "survivorship bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Survivorship_bias&oldid=948047578 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Survivorship_bias...

rumanator 7y ago
I would also add "self promotion" to the list.
uk_programmer 7y ago
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".

austincheney 7y ago

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.

nsgi 7y ago
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.

rpiguy 7y ago

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!

heyflyguy 7y ago
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).
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  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...
  - cushychicken 7y ago
    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.

rchaud 7y ago

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.

ianai 7y ago
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.
icedchai 7y ago
Yep. I read it and thought I missed some pages, maybe accidentally scrolled down or something.
catacombs 7y ago
The article screams "privilege."

sillycube 7y ago

Site not available for reading...

brianmcc 7y ago

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?

ianai 7y ago
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.
- brianmcc 7y ago
  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.
  - ianai 7y ago
    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-depression-was-great-this-one-might-be-greater https://www.fastcompany.com/90486801/top-economist-the-1930s...
    - 7y ago

cutler 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

meowzero 7y ago

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.

mywittyname 7y ago
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.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  $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.

seisvelas 7y ago

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 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 7y ago
> 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
- deleted 7y ago
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- dmd 7y ago
  > 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.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Is there any content in this?

anticsapp 7y ago

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.

cosmiccatnap 7y ago

I can accomplish X so there's no excuse for you not to accomplish Y. Ok man, whatever you say.

mcamaj 7y ago

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.

baxter001 7y ago

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.

Der_Einzige 7y ago

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?

kokey 7y ago

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.

kerhackernews 7y ago

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.

ianai 7y ago
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