12 ms·

What would a recession mean for developers?

103 points by wagslane 4y ago

dorchadas 4y ago
This is something worrying me, looking for a junior role. I was a teacher for 5 years (math and physics) and recently went back to get a masters in Theoretical Physics and Applied Maths, mostly leaning towards the latter. Lots of data science-y stuff and mathematical modelling. Been applying to jobs for a while now, and no luck unfortunately. Wondering if I should just give up and go back to teaching, especially as I can return to my old school which was laid back and not horrible (and I didn't hate teaching), or keep pushing through. I've got a runway of about a year, depending on how reasonable the housing I can find in Ireland is (not very). Part of my issue is I'm also looking in Ireland, where I'll require a visa, even if it's a critical needs job so they're easier to get. Does hurt, but I haven't had any luck with my applications in America either.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  Why don't you search for jobs in the country you are living? It would be easier to find a job there than overseas.
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    I am living in Ireland, currently doing said masters. Should've been more explicit in that.
spacemanmatt 4y ago
In 2006, the recession meant a tight jobs market for me for around a year, but after things started to open up a bit, a lot of new (and in some cases, unskilled) developers did not return to the market.
throwoutway 4y ago
The author appears a novice at financial information. For example the author mistakes inflation rates for the Fed’s interest rates > For the same reason, the Fed is raising inflation rates
lvl102 4y ago
Maybe next time people will build something more productive than imaginary coins, rehashed dot-com ideas, and outright frauds.
MandieD 4y ago
Having graduated into the shadow of the 2000-ish dotcom bust, it means being happy about that boring government contracting job in the DC ‘burbs with a starting salary that was about 60% what your friends who graduated two years earlier got at much cooler companies in more happening places, because you also saw their cool companies fold and them struggle to make their fancy car payments and you’re staring down the barrel of $40k in student loans (an astronomical sum 20 years ago).
DeathArrow 4y ago
If recession comes, wouldn't there be an incentive for companies to cut costly developer jobs in rich countries and move the development in countries with cheaper work force? Having teams collaborating over borders, time zones, languages and accents does not work very good. Outsourcing to another company does not yield good results. But big corporations can open subsidiaries in other countries, if they do not already have and move whole products there. If that happens, the massive lay offs will push the wages down aggressively.
journey_16162 4y ago
I'm bootstrapping a small software product and working as a contractor to support myself. I have been long thinking about switching to a full time job instead. After reading the recent comments here and in other threads, it seems like getting some 100k seed funding may be easier than getting a new job.
AddingValue 4y ago
Ok it might sound stupid but... make ur life as independent from stock markets as possible If FED prints a lot of cash and lends it to banks for 0% = stocks are up, if FED stops printing & lends at 0.5% banks panic. Wtf?
Rebecca6777657 4y ago
No one deserves to be cheated upon. If you feel you are been cheated on and you don’t have vivid proof. Reach out to him via ”wisetechacker @gmail com” He’s the real cause he delivers a timely and accurate services, i’ve used and recommend him to lot of people over the internet and he did a satisfactory job
steve_adams_86 4y ago
The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.
- vinyl7 4y ago
  I've been searching for my first junior/entry level position for 4 months now. There's very few junior/entry positions, and the ones that are posted are asking for 2-3 years experience, and a Bachelors/Masters/PHD...for web development. The market is either asking for senior developers at senior pay, or mid-senior level developers at entry level pay. I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. If a company is willing to take me on and help train me and bring me up to speed, I'd stay with them for 4+ years. I'd think that would be very valuable to a company, but at least what I read on the internet...companies have come to expect a high turnover for developers and thus are unwilling to put in any effort into a new employee.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    What kind of studies do you have? Do you know the basics of like CS, algorithms, data structures? Do you know a programming language at a decent level? For the field you are trying to get in, do you know some common used frameworks, libraries and tools? If the answer is yes to all, you shouldn't have trouble to find a job. If one of the answers is a no, then you have to solve that problem.
    - vinyl7 4y ago
      I'm mostly self taught. Been programming as a hobby for 10+ years, mostly focused on learning game development but have also done web development. I have "shipped" two Ludum Dare games done in C++, and I have a web app I recently developed with React/PHP/MySQL for an organization that is deployed. The only credential I have is a Full Stack Web development cert from a bootcamp at a big name university. The DSA stuff I self-taught because it's pretty essential to game dev, and the bootcamp taught me the MERN stack.
deleted 4y ago
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MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I've been contacted by a number of recruiters recently who are recruiting for positions that are paying FAR more than the market average of just a few years ago. I'm talking an average increase of over 50%. I'm honestly concerned that my entire team, after having received low percentage pay increases in the past year, is going to end up leaving within the next 4-6 months, and I'm not sure the product is capable of surviving that sort of brain drain. I've tried to warn my manager multiple times about the situation, but he's not the kind of guy to attempt to swim against the stream with upper management.
- TavsiE9s 4y ago
  I’ve heard the whole “money can’t be everything when deciding on a job” a couple of times when discussing salaries recently. Mostly from companies who realise they can’t or don’t want to compete with the market. Shrug and move on. They’ll learn eventually.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >They’ll learn eventually. A lot of companies just can't afford to match big tech Silicon Valley salaries in general. They may make exceptions for specific individuals but my impression is there's a fairly widespread attitude, however resigned, that if you can get a job with Facebook and you're fine with that, we're not going to try to outbid them.
  - Silhouette 4y ago
    Money is at least understandable. It is a finite resource after all. What I really don't get is employers who are still pushing for other conditions that will deter good people from applying - things like annoying processes or insisting on hybrid working instead of allowing fully remote if there is no clear benefit to those policies.
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      It's true. We are based out of Dallas and we interviewed a great QA candidate this week from the East Coast who, when asked what the reason for looking for another job was, said that their employer had a hybrid policy, but after having experienced fully remote working, they never wanted to go back to that.
onion2k 4y ago
It might be harder to find a job, but it doesn't significantly impact whether or not you should start a business. pg wrote an essay on starting up in a downturn: http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
- pharmakom 4y ago
  PG has an agenda on this one. Doing a start-up, the job market and my skills are my security. If the work gets scarce the risk profile of doing a start-up gets worse.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    If you're looking for security you shouldn't be doing a startup in the first place. It's pretty much the riskiest move you can make as far as your career goes.
    - pharmakom 4y ago
      That’s binary thinking. Risk level is a spectrum.
      - mbalex99 4y ago
        Yes but the risk is highly asymmetric. Starting a company is skewed towards danger and not certain reward in both bull and bear market.
deleted 4y ago
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advael 4y ago
The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteboard coding" and fiddly little problems as assessments, which I think is overall a good thing. My own experience has taught me that smart hiring managers are more interested in you getting along with the people you'll be working with, along with your willingness to try stuff you don't already know how to do, and talk about what you do to non-technical stakeholders, and from what I've heard from my more junior-in-the-industry friends, this seems to bear out across the board That said, none of them are targeting FAANG jobs and neither am I, so if you are, this may be wildly wrong
- bitwize 4y ago
  "Brush up on CS fundamentals" means "grind leetcode" which is already table stakes for getting a job, and about to become more important. In a recession, companies will crack down on candidates with interpersonal skills and confidence but no competence. Interpersonal skills and confidence are deciding factors after you've filtered out the candidates with low technical skill, as determined by leetcode, whiteboard, online coding exercises, etc. Once again, I've seen enough candidates talk the talk, and then get caught typing in answers verbatim from Google or SO, to know that eliminating coding exercises in the interview process is folly -- it's opening the door for bad hires who can't code and who waste everyone's time.
  - cto_of_antifa 4y ago
  - advael 4y ago
    Honestly to me the most important piece is the willingness and ability to try new things and work under certainty. I have seen first hand time and time again that it is easier for someone who is good at this to learn how to code when the rubber hits the road than it is for someone who knows how to code but isn't comfortable learning on the fly to learn a new python library fast enough to work with the team. On a super short timescale with no testing feedback loop, 99% of "algorithms" questions are "Have you encountered this thing before" shit tests in practice, rather than meaningful tests of problem-solving skills, and do not effectively test whether someone will be effective. This is to me a classic Goodhart's Law + policy problem: One can easily assess the answer to an algorithm problem, so it's popular as an assessment and becomes pervasive. Goodhart's Law predicts the next part
RyanOD 4y ago
I'm someone who qualifies as a junior developer even though I have a minor in CS, a BS in math, and a BS in mechanical engineering. My career has been an interesting journey. I've worked in sales, taught high school mathematic and computer science, and led technical SEO for multiple successful startups. I left all that in January to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time frontend developer. My wife and I have two daughters and this is my opportunity to show them some risks are worth taking. I'm not fooling myself into thinking my first developer job is going to fall into my lap, but I'm confident it's out there and I'm going to keep writing code and challenging myself all day, every day until I find it.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- MrWiffles 4y ago
  If you’re willing to “out” yourself publicly here, and assuming it’s not against any rules, you could post a link to your GitHub profile if you’ve got some open source work out there. Can’t promise it’ll help, but a lot more people read these comments than comment themselves… …a LOT more.
  - travoltaj 4y ago
    I'm one of those. I'm more interested in the comments than the posts.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    and/or an email address — would love to reach out!
- kmeraz 4y ago
  hey, I made the career transition myself 5-6 years ago. I’d love to pay it forward and help someone else do the same. Let me know if you’d like some help and the best way for us to chat.
pojzon 4y ago
It means: „Find a big disfunctional corpo and hire there for a year or two, before you dump that job for something better.” Just got hired to one for a fat paycheck, ppl skill is way below the market average yet noone seems to care or even notice.
bjelkeman-again 4y ago
I have worked through three recessions as a software analyst, or tech entrepreneur. The investment climate gets worse in a recession (we had to shut down a company after the dotcom crash), but the job market never seemed an issue for me or those around me that worked with IT or software development. There where always jobs. None of my colleges ended up without a job for any longer period. There is a huge skills shortage in IT.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The dot-com crash was very difficult for a lot of people in tech generally. Maybe it was a bit better for developers specifically. But I was laid off pretty much as a direct result of the crash. As it turned out I was able to get a job pretty quickly from someone I knew. Subsequent times got a bit lean but I was basically employed the whole time. I considered myself very lucky though. Aside from the job I ended up with, which took about a month to come through, I wasn't seeing anything remotely like a nibble.
lordnacho 4y ago
Don't spend your time getting better at your job. I'm not saying you don't need to be good, I'm saying the time is better spent doing something else. That other thing is networking. Connect with recruiters on LinkedIn and hit them up for referrals to jobs. I have a quite long list of recruiters in the quant trading niche who contact me from time to time. When they ping me I find out who is hiring and what they're after, and if it's not for me I might know someone for the role. When it's my turn to look, I reach out and there's a firehose of interviews. With a little bit of effort you end up feeling quite comfortable that if you need a new role, there will be one. It contributes substantially to my tranquility.
- skhm 4y ago
  I also have a tranche of quant folk on LinkedIn but I always assumed they were either selling snake oil or if the roles really were that lucrative, there’d be a work-life balance clash. But it’s not my field, so this is more a gut feeling.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Why would it be snake oil? They don't take any cash from the employee. As for balance it depends a heck of a lot on the particular shop you're joining.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
We got off easy in last recession broadly speaking, obviously it wasn't the same for everyone, but lots of companies invested heavily in IT (or at least claimed to be doing so to their shareholders) in order to cut costs elsewhere. Whether the same happens this time around is certainly debatable. Perhaps, cuting IT to investing in sales and marketing will be in fashion this time around.
rdevsrex 4y ago
If you really just need work asap, Upwork is a great place to go. However, I have love/hate relationship with the platform, as getting noticed can be very hard and they take money off the table. But having found permanent employment on there, and also having hired people on there, sorry to be biased, but if you sound like a native speaker and can hold your own in a Zoom meeting, that's half the yardstick met for me when it comes to hiring. The number of foreign devs whose English is so bad that you just have to communicate in writing is high. Business people like to communicate verbally, so if you aren't confident, practice. Hmm, I wonder if there is a startup out there that does English training to help non-native English speakers sound like native speakers? My wife's first language is German, but she really put time into becoming a native-level English speaker, so it is possible.
- langitbiru 4y ago
  Backed by YC, there is one startup doing that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/boldvoice-y-combinator-pre-seed/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/boldvoice-y-combinator-pre...
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > I wonder if there is a startup out there that does English training to help non-native English speakers sound like native speakers? There are many vocal coaches. Search Google or Youtube - you'll find a lot of them. It's hard to sound like a native speaker especially when your current state is not understandable. It's an iterative process, so who knows that person might get to native level. I believe it's much easier for women compared to men - to sound like native English speakers, because they have much crisp voice compared to most men.
- tymofiy 4y ago
  There is https://elsaspeak.com/ https://elsaspeak.com/ - AI-powered coaching app. It helped me a lot.
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Might have to find work that involves moving your body, oh the horror
einpoklum 4y ago
> https://blog.boot.dev/about/ https://blog.boot.dev/about/ They're an outfit which offers (online) coding-cum-cs courses. Which is perfectly legit, but they have a bias when giving advice.
dspillett 4y ago
I'm not the normal case (dropped away from uni due to personal issues, lucked out getting better work than some of my compatriots graduated into 18 months later) and I've been in work for two decades & change (working on the same family if products, though I've been in several companies due to buyouts and such over the years), so I can't speak for the junior looking for work. One bit of advice I might suggest though is to consider the industry you end up working in: for instance those of us in companies targeting regulated industries tend to weather financial storms a bit better than others because the need to follow regulations doesn't fall away in fact if the behaviour of an industry is seen as a cause of a crash (here's looking at you, sub-prime lending) then regulation will increase and non-tech companies will want some way of implementing/monitoring/automating compliance with it. It might not be sexy work, but it is relatively recession-safe work. Though as others point out: networking, and just being good at working, and good at adapting to change, are important too. Even in a relatively safe position the cost cutting axe may fall (due to a slump in sales, or post-merger, etc.) and how well you work with the rest of the company or how key your experience & flexibility are seen as being, can be far more important than pure technical skill when it comes to keeping a safe distance from that blade.
dougmwne 4y ago
What if, and bear with me here for a minute, the software fields are going to fare the best out of everyone? The value of tech investment is no longer in question like it was in 2000. The world's largest companies are tech companies, and it's now accepted wisdom that software is not a cost, but a rocket ship and the rocket ships have just become reusable (due to the magic of software I might add). Maybe it's everyone else who should be worrying that their lowly mere human productivity is going to badly suffer in a tightening job market. Just like in 2008 the meatspace employment was hit hard and never recovered, maybe we can expect a doubling down of investment in productivity multipliers and increasingly replacing jobs with software and ML. I mean how can any heartless MBA look at the output of DALL-E 2 and Imagen and not immediately start scheming to fire 90% of their creative staff?
- hamdouni 4y ago
  What if IA replace coder or no-code makes coder useless ? Maybe the same heartless MBA would reduce programmer staff ?
  - bool3max 4y ago
    The no-code tools have to be maintained by someone.
  - FastMonkey 4y ago
    With people falling over themselves to prove how well work from home works, it's more likely that the jobs just go abroad.

103 points by wagslane 4y ago

This is something worrying me, looking for a junior role. I was a teacher for 5 years (math and physics) and recently went back to get a masters in Theoretical Physics and Applied Maths, mostly leaning towards the latter. Lots of data science-y stuff and mathematical modelling. Been applying to jobs for a while now, and no luck unfortunately. Wondering if I should just give up and go back to teaching, especially as I can return to my old school which was laid back and not horrible (and I didn't hate teaching), or keep pushing through. I've got a runway of about a year, depending on how reasonable the housing I can find in Ireland is (not very). Part of my issue is I'm also looking in Ireland, where I'll require a visa, even if it's a critical needs job so they're easier to get. Does hurt, but I haven't had any luck with my applications in America either.

DeathArrow 4y ago
Why don't you search for jobs in the country you are living? It would be easier to find a job there than overseas.
- dorchadas 4y ago
  I am living in Ireland, currently doing said masters. Should've been more explicit in that.

spacemanmatt 4y ago

In 2006, the recession meant a tight jobs market for me for around a year, but after things started to open up a bit, a lot of new (and in some cases, unskilled) developers did not return to the market.

throwoutway 4y ago

The author appears a novice at financial information. For example the author mistakes inflation rates for the Fed’s interest rates > For the same reason, the Fed is raising inflation rates

lvl102 4y ago

Maybe next time people will build something more productive than imaginary coins, rehashed dot-com ideas, and outright frauds.

MandieD 4y ago

Having graduated into the shadow of the 2000-ish dotcom bust, it means being happy about that boring government contracting job in the DC ‘burbs with a starting salary that was about 60% what your friends who graduated two years earlier got at much cooler companies in more happening places, because you also saw their cool companies fold and them struggle to make their fancy car payments and you’re staring down the barrel of $40k in student loans (an astronomical sum 20 years ago).

DeathArrow 4y ago

If recession comes, wouldn't there be an incentive for companies to cut costly developer jobs in rich countries and move the development in countries with cheaper work force? Having teams collaborating over borders, time zones, languages and accents does not work very good. Outsourcing to another company does not yield good results. But big corporations can open subsidiaries in other countries, if they do not already have and move whole products there. If that happens, the massive lay offs will push the wages down aggressively.

journey_16162 4y ago

I'm bootstrapping a small software product and working as a contractor to support myself. I have been long thinking about switching to a full time job instead. After reading the recent comments here and in other threads, it seems like getting some 100k seed funding may be easier than getting a new job.

AddingValue 4y ago

Ok it might sound stupid but... make ur life as independent from stock markets as possible If FED prints a lot of cash and lends it to banks for 0% = stocks are up, if FED stops printing & lends at 0.5% banks panic. Wtf?

Rebecca6777657 4y ago

No one deserves to be cheated upon. If you feel you are been cheated on and you don’t have vivid proof. Reach out to him via ”wisetechacker @gmail com” He’s the real cause he delivers a timely and accurate services, i’ve used and recommend him to lot of people over the internet and he did a satisfactory job

steve_adams_86 4y ago

The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.

vinyl7 4y ago
I've been searching for my first junior/entry level position for 4 months now. There's very few junior/entry positions, and the ones that are posted are asking for 2-3 years experience, and a Bachelors/Masters/PHD...for web development. The market is either asking for senior developers at senior pay, or mid-senior level developers at entry level pay. I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. If a company is willing to take me on and help train me and bring me up to speed, I'd stay with them for 4+ years. I'd think that would be very valuable to a company, but at least what I read on the internet...companies have come to expect a high turnover for developers and thus are unwilling to put in any effort into a new employee.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  What kind of studies do you have? Do you know the basics of like CS, algorithms, data structures? Do you know a programming language at a decent level? For the field you are trying to get in, do you know some common used frameworks, libraries and tools? If the answer is yes to all, you shouldn't have trouble to find a job. If one of the answers is a no, then you have to solve that problem.
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    I'm mostly self taught. Been programming as a hobby for 10+ years, mostly focused on learning game development but have also done web development. I have "shipped" two Ludum Dare games done in C++, and I have a web app I recently developed with React/PHP/MySQL for an organization that is deployed. The only credential I have is a Full Stack Web development cert from a bootcamp at a big name university. The DSA stuff I self-taught because it's pretty essential to game dev, and the bootcamp taught me the MERN stack.

deleted 4y ago

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MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I've been contacted by a number of recruiters recently who are recruiting for positions that are paying FAR more than the market average of just a few years ago. I'm talking an average increase of over 50%. I'm honestly concerned that my entire team, after having received low percentage pay increases in the past year, is going to end up leaving within the next 4-6 months, and I'm not sure the product is capable of surviving that sort of brain drain. I've tried to warn my manager multiple times about the situation, but he's not the kind of guy to attempt to swim against the stream with upper management.

TavsiE9s 4y ago
I’ve heard the whole “money can’t be everything when deciding on a job” a couple of times when discussing salaries recently. Mostly from companies who realise they can’t or don’t want to compete with the market. Shrug and move on. They’ll learn eventually.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >They’ll learn eventually. A lot of companies just can't afford to match big tech Silicon Valley salaries in general. They may make exceptions for specific individuals but my impression is there's a fairly widespread attitude, however resigned, that if you can get a job with Facebook and you're fine with that, we're not going to try to outbid them.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  Money is at least understandable. It is a finite resource after all. What I really don't get is employers who are still pushing for other conditions that will deter good people from applying - things like annoying processes or insisting on hybrid working instead of allowing fully remote if there is no clear benefit to those policies.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    It's true. We are based out of Dallas and we interviewed a great QA candidate this week from the East Coast who, when asked what the reason for looking for another job was, said that their employer had a hybrid policy, but after having experienced fully remote working, they never wanted to go back to that.

onion2k 4y ago

It might be harder to find a job, but it doesn't significantly impact whether or not you should start a business. pg wrote an essay on starting up in a downturn: http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

pharmakom 4y ago
PG has an agenda on this one. Doing a start-up, the job market and my skills are my security. If the work gets scarce the risk profile of doing a start-up gets worse.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If you're looking for security you shouldn't be doing a startup in the first place. It's pretty much the riskiest move you can make as far as your career goes.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    That’s binary thinking. Risk level is a spectrum.
    - mbalex99 4y ago
      Yes but the risk is highly asymmetric. Starting a company is skewed towards danger and not certain reward in both bull and bear market.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

advael 4y ago

The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteboard coding" and fiddly little problems as assessments, which I think is overall a good thing. My own experience has taught me that smart hiring managers are more interested in you getting along with the people you'll be working with, along with your willingness to try stuff you don't already know how to do, and talk about what you do to non-technical stakeholders, and from what I've heard from my more junior-in-the-industry friends, this seems to bear out across the board That said, none of them are targeting FAANG jobs and neither am I, so if you are, this may be wildly wrong

bitwize 4y ago
"Brush up on CS fundamentals" means "grind leetcode" which is already table stakes for getting a job, and about to become more important. In a recession, companies will crack down on candidates with interpersonal skills and confidence but no competence. Interpersonal skills and confidence are deciding factors after you've filtered out the candidates with low technical skill, as determined by leetcode, whiteboard, online coding exercises, etc. Once again, I've seen enough candidates talk the talk, and then get caught typing in answers verbatim from Google or SO, to know that eliminating coding exercises in the interview process is folly -- it's opening the door for bad hires who can't code and who waste everyone's time.
- cto_of_antifa 4y ago
- advael 4y ago
  Honestly to me the most important piece is the willingness and ability to try new things and work under certainty. I have seen first hand time and time again that it is easier for someone who is good at this to learn how to code when the rubber hits the road than it is for someone who knows how to code but isn't comfortable learning on the fly to learn a new python library fast enough to work with the team. On a super short timescale with no testing feedback loop, 99% of "algorithms" questions are "Have you encountered this thing before" shit tests in practice, rather than meaningful tests of problem-solving skills, and do not effectively test whether someone will be effective. This is to me a classic Goodhart's Law + policy problem: One can easily assess the answer to an algorithm problem, so it's popular as an assessment and becomes pervasive. Goodhart's Law predicts the next part

RyanOD 4y ago

I'm someone who qualifies as a junior developer even though I have a minor in CS, a BS in math, and a BS in mechanical engineering. My career has been an interesting journey. I've worked in sales, taught high school mathematic and computer science, and led technical SEO for multiple successful startups. I left all that in January to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time frontend developer. My wife and I have two daughters and this is my opportunity to show them some risks are worth taking. I'm not fooling myself into thinking my first developer job is going to fall into my lap, but I'm confident it's out there and I'm going to keep writing code and challenging myself all day, every day until I find it.

newaccount2021 4y ago
MrWiffles 4y ago
If you’re willing to “out” yourself publicly here, and assuming it’s not against any rules, you could post a link to your GitHub profile if you’ve got some open source work out there. Can’t promise it’ll help, but a lot more people read these comments than comment themselves… …a LOT more.
- travoltaj 4y ago
  I'm one of those. I'm more interested in the comments than the posts.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  and/or an email address — would love to reach out!
kmeraz 4y ago
hey, I made the career transition myself 5-6 years ago. I’d love to pay it forward and help someone else do the same. Let me know if you’d like some help and the best way for us to chat.

pojzon 4y ago

It means: „Find a big disfunctional corpo and hire there for a year or two, before you dump that job for something better.” Just got hired to one for a fat paycheck, ppl skill is way below the market average yet noone seems to care or even notice.

bjelkeman-again 4y ago

I have worked through three recessions as a software analyst, or tech entrepreneur. The investment climate gets worse in a recession (we had to shut down a company after the dotcom crash), but the job market never seemed an issue for me or those around me that worked with IT or software development. There where always jobs. None of my colleges ended up without a job for any longer period. There is a huge skills shortage in IT.

ghaff 4y ago
The dot-com crash was very difficult for a lot of people in tech generally. Maybe it was a bit better for developers specifically. But I was laid off pretty much as a direct result of the crash. As it turned out I was able to get a job pretty quickly from someone I knew. Subsequent times got a bit lean but I was basically employed the whole time. I considered myself very lucky though. Aside from the job I ended up with, which took about a month to come through, I wasn't seeing anything remotely like a nibble.

lordnacho 4y ago

Don't spend your time getting better at your job. I'm not saying you don't need to be good, I'm saying the time is better spent doing something else. That other thing is networking. Connect with recruiters on LinkedIn and hit them up for referrals to jobs. I have a quite long list of recruiters in the quant trading niche who contact me from time to time. When they ping me I find out who is hiring and what they're after, and if it's not for me I might know someone for the role. When it's my turn to look, I reach out and there's a firehose of interviews. With a little bit of effort you end up feeling quite comfortable that if you need a new role, there will be one. It contributes substantially to my tranquility.

skhm 4y ago
I also have a tranche of quant folk on LinkedIn but I always assumed they were either selling snake oil or if the roles really were that lucrative, there’d be a work-life balance clash. But it’s not my field, so this is more a gut feeling.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Why would it be snake oil? They don't take any cash from the employee. As for balance it depends a heck of a lot on the particular shop you're joining.

VBprogrammer 4y ago

We got off easy in last recession broadly speaking, obviously it wasn't the same for everyone, but lots of companies invested heavily in IT (or at least claimed to be doing so to their shareholders) in order to cut costs elsewhere. Whether the same happens this time around is certainly debatable. Perhaps, cuting IT to investing in sales and marketing will be in fashion this time around.

rdevsrex 4y ago

If you really just need work asap, Upwork is a great place to go. However, I have love/hate relationship with the platform, as getting noticed can be very hard and they take money off the table. But having found permanent employment on there, and also having hired people on there, sorry to be biased, but if you sound like a native speaker and can hold your own in a Zoom meeting, that's half the yardstick met for me when it comes to hiring. The number of foreign devs whose English is so bad that you just have to communicate in writing is high. Business people like to communicate verbally, so if you aren't confident, practice. Hmm, I wonder if there is a startup out there that does English training to help non-native English speakers sound like native speakers? My wife's first language is German, but she really put time into becoming a native-level English speaker, so it is possible.

langitbiru 4y ago
Backed by YC, there is one startup doing that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/boldvoice-y-combinator-pre-seed/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/boldvoice-y-combinator-pre...
mandeepj 4y ago
> I wonder if there is a startup out there that does English training to help non-native English speakers sound like native speakers? There are many vocal coaches. Search Google or Youtube - you'll find a lot of them. It's hard to sound like a native speaker especially when your current state is not understandable. It's an iterative process, so who knows that person might get to native level. I believe it's much easier for women compared to men - to sound like native English speakers, because they have much crisp voice compared to most men.
tymofiy 4y ago
There is https://elsaspeak.com/ https://elsaspeak.com/ - AI-powered coaching app. It helped me a lot.

jimmygrapes 4y ago

Might have to find work that involves moving your body, oh the horror

einpoklum 4y ago

> https://blog.boot.dev/about/ https://blog.boot.dev/about/ They're an outfit which offers (online) coding-cum-cs courses. Which is perfectly legit, but they have a bias when giving advice.

dspillett 4y ago

I'm not the normal case (dropped away from uni due to personal issues, lucked out getting better work than some of my compatriots graduated into 18 months later) and I've been in work for two decades & change (working on the same family if products, though I've been in several companies due to buyouts and such over the years), so I can't speak for the junior looking for work. One bit of advice I might suggest though is to consider the industry you end up working in: for instance those of us in companies targeting regulated industries tend to weather financial storms a bit better than others because the need to follow regulations doesn't fall away in fact if the behaviour of an industry is seen as a cause of a crash (here's looking at you, sub-prime lending) then regulation will increase and non-tech companies will want some way of implementing/monitoring/automating compliance with it. It might not be sexy work, but it is relatively recession-safe work. Though as others point out: networking, and just being good at working, and good at adapting to change, are important too. Even in a relatively safe position the cost cutting axe may fall (due to a slump in sales, or post-merger, etc.) and how well you work with the rest of the company or how key your experience & flexibility are seen as being, can be far more important than pure technical skill when it comes to keeping a safe distance from that blade.

dougmwne 4y ago

What if, and bear with me here for a minute, the software fields are going to fare the best out of everyone? The value of tech investment is no longer in question like it was in 2000. The world's largest companies are tech companies, and it's now accepted wisdom that software is not a cost, but a rocket ship and the rocket ships have just become reusable (due to the magic of software I might add). Maybe it's everyone else who should be worrying that their lowly mere human productivity is going to badly suffer in a tightening job market. Just like in 2008 the meatspace employment was hit hard and never recovered, maybe we can expect a doubling down of investment in productivity multipliers and increasingly replacing jobs with software and ML. I mean how can any heartless MBA look at the output of DALL-E 2 and Imagen and not immediately start scheming to fire 90% of their creative staff?

hamdouni 4y ago
What if IA replace coder or no-code makes coder useless ? Maybe the same heartless MBA would reduce programmer staff ?
- bool3max 4y ago
  The no-code tools have to be maintained by someone.
- FastMonkey 4y ago
  With people falling over themselves to prove how well work from home works, it's more likely that the jobs just go abroad.