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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

My fear never went away. As someone who graduated at the very beginning of the Great Recession, I have a constant feeling that this cannot be forever.

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Even prior to that, many of us watched our parents _very unceremoniously_ lose their "job for life" jobs in the 80s and 90s. The illusion of loyalty to an employer and job security went up in smoke with those layoffs, for me personally.

And statistics don't apply to the individual. I'm a 3rd generation programmer and watched my own father get the boot by his company just because they wanted to "restructure to Chicago". 27 years at that job -- it defined where we put our roots down.

I really enjoy the people I work with, but I never take stability for granted. Ensuring I'm always updating my resume and taking a couple interviews a year is part of my professional ritual. If it were feasible, we'd move elsewhere, but we both have good social networks and roots here -- which is arguably more "expensive" to a working couple in their early thirties than gold.

Similar experience here. 25 years at a "job for life" and he got a carriage clock. A couple of years later we move to the other side of the UK. A couple of years later they shut down that office making dad redundant.

I am under no illusions about any company I might work for, no matter what size or how much I like the individuals I work with or for.

>it defined where we put our roots down.

Sadly, I don't feel like I will ever put my roots down in a place. I'm of the mind that I always have to ready to pack up and move to the new office if means I can keep my job and lifestyle.

raised by immigrant parents who were self-employed I was always scared away from the corporate world for this reason. They were constantly talking about how people can get laid off very quickly. They tried to steer me into medicine for this reason (recession proof. Didn't take). I'm now in a corporate setting and aim to be self-employed again soon enough.

I graduated in 1995, at the peak of the dot-com boom. I'm still pretty much always in fear of losing my job: there's always somebody willing to do it for less.

Especially now with the record enrollment in CS/CE programs over the past 5-10 years. The industry has been awash with fresh talent for the past few years and I don't see it slowing down.

Maybe it's different in the US but in Europe companies still struggle to find good job candidates. They get tons of applications of course but they aren't good/experienced enough. Basically many companies' bottleneck is hiring.

The past two companies I've worked for had nearly as many interns as FTEs on some teams. My current company has about 1/8th of the building dedicated to engineering intern cubes, and they are packed in like sardines too.

When speaking with former colleagues, the topic of interns often comes up. I had drinks with some last week who mentioned her team had so many interns that some FTEs needed to double-up to manage them all.

It could be regional. When I was coming up, internships were rarely a thing. I was never one and hadn't even seen an CS intern until a few years back. Seeing companies go from 0% to 40% of engineering staff as interns over the course of four years is pretty striking.

That sounds like disaster waiting to happen. Just thinking about my skills as an intern vs. my skills now: good luck to that employer when, 3 years down the line, most of the interns and current FTE's have left and the code is unreadable.

Dude. I beg of you, to stop repeating the propaganda that big tech so desperately wants you, and everyone else to believe.

There is NOT a shortage in developers. There NEVER WAS.

Big Tech simply couldn't stomach the rise in salaries that we saw between 2005 and 2017/2018. This all comes down to cost. There's plenty of talent not just in the US, but abroad. But big tech continues to see a need to drive prices down, and profits up. The best way to do that? Pay employees less.

Trust me when I say that programming is a blue collar job in 10 years. Big tech has done a phenomenal job convincing even engineers, that the pool of talent is "so small" that their job couldn't possibly be at risk if everyone and their mother gets a CS degree.

Good luck to you, if that's your mindset.

Big Tech yes, but there are smaller companies who have an insanely hard time finding well rounded full stack engineers.

Having a hard time finding employees does not necessarily mean there is a shortage of employees. There are two sides to this market. What are the companies doing right who are successfully finding people? How much are they offering in compensation?

Based on my last job search, smaller companies just aren't paying salaries that are going to attract well rounded full stack engineers.

The reason software engineering pay so much better than similar fields is since there is a lack of software engineers. Encouraging people to pick that option in order to lower wages to similar levels as other fields makes perfect sense, don't you agree?

That has nothing to do with a shortage of engineers. There are plenty of engineers, just none that are willing to work for 70k a year.

There is a salary divide between what big companies can pay, and what little companies can pay. That's drawing a significant portion of the talent away from the smaller labor market.

Either the smaller companies need to consider hiring more junior engineers (of which there are plenty). Or they need to make their offers more attractive.

Or we recognize that steering more students towards programming is good both for their career and the economy. It is only people who wants developers to stay better paid than other similar fields who thinks that it isn't a shortage.

> I beg of you, to stop repeating the propaganda that big tech so desperately wants you, and everyone else to believe.

I fell for this hard. I was in high school reading blog left and right about how in demand programmers were and that you didn't even really need college because it was too much theory, not solving the problems companies want.

So I decided, why take all that time when I could make make money right out of high school. Turns out, that decision hsa kinda screwed me now.

Now I did get started before some of the hype. I guess it was there, but not as prominent or in my face. I do general enjou programming and solving problems and it's not just a money thing for me. Unfortunately, I feel my decisions will choke my career eventually.

I feel like that's unrealistic expectations - just because I'm applying for a senior role doesn't mean I'll have 5 years of React.

For senior tech employees there's a big drain from Europe towards USA; if you have the experience and skills then it's feasible to get much more money across the pond, as tech salaries in Europe tend to be lower than USA even if we exclude the Silicon Valley salary peak.

I'm not concerned about fresh talent. When I went to a state school I was worried, I wrote scripts, did some minor html and word press. I considered myself as someone who has 0 experience programming. I did quite well but I did not expect the amount of people who simply are not cut out for programming. In programming 1 and 2 about 50% completed the course. Discrete structure only 15%. Algorithms less than 50%. It was an insane experience and the school is no MIT. People pick CS because they all think they will make $100k straight out of school. They don't care about computers/programming. Someone that is half passionate will have much greater results because they take some pride in their work.

Plus, good problem solvers do not have to program to make money. You can go work for smaller company and help them define processes, improve automation or manage software/system integration.

I don’t think 1995 was the peak of the dot-com boom. It was just starting out then, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

The peak came in 2000, just before the bust (gradual rise, hard fall).

I went to grad school after graduating in 1998, I was lucky enough to miss both recessions (I was in China in 2008). Now I’m jobless during a boom :). But I guess, as always, the best way to protect yourself is to be at the top of the tech curve (this is a double edge sword if you specialize in something that isn’t currently hot).

I'm right there with you. I rode out the recession in graduate school and I've been waiting for the sky to fall pretty much since the time I got my first good tech job in 2014.

Yup, it will. It is only a matter of time. Have to expect as much and plan accordingly. That's reality in this day and age.

I graduated later, when unemployment rates were dropping continuously. I still have this fear, even though the justification for it is not well founded (I've been able to get internships for all of summers, and had full time offer in hand before the start of my senior year).

It seems much more likely to me that this is an instinctual fear. Our jobs are our primary mechanism by which we get the resources we need to survive. Of course we'd worry about losing that, even when times are doing well. The cavemen that didn't have this fear probably starved at higher rates.

That is a good feeling to have because it cannot and will not. It has been the same for every generation whether they felt it or not

Do you have savings? If you had enough saved to spend a year looking for another job, would you still live in fear?

Statistically "everyone" who graduated in the Great Recession is still a year or two at least (and in some cases far more) from paying off student loans. Statistically we're a generation of nothing but debt with no savings to fallback on because we've never had a long enough "peace time" of growth to pay back our creditors.

It's wonderful to imagine some hypothetical reality where you had enough saved to survive an entire year looking for a job. What privilege you would have! Presumably you have no health problems because CORBA is broken again and the current administration crippled HCA guarantees because who needs affordable health care when you don't have a current employer. It feels like you might as well wish for a Pegasus to fly you to all your job interviews while you are at it.

We've all earned our cynical stripes here, but thanks for offering a lovely fantasy.

You’re not responsible for your generation, just yourself.

You didn’t answer my question about savings. Are you saving? If not you can and you should.

If you don’t have savings the first step is to come up with a budget. Send me an email if you need help it’s in my profile.

Can't budget very well, or save at all if you make exactly how much your base-level living expenses are bud. I'm still eating ramen at the end of the month. What am I supposed to be budgeting here? Count out my bowtie pasta pieces more precisely to budget them? My generation simply can't live like this, it isn't sustainable, and isn't realistic to expect professionals to live in poverty. I barely have enough business casual clothes to make it through a single week cycle and buying more is a huge expense to me. Something bigger is going to have give, maybe a recession is what is needed to show people how unrealistic this is.

If your living expenses are truly exactly your income then you need to move. You’re either making really little or living in an expensive area.

If you were in say Dallas TX for example and you waited on tables for $14 / hour you would be making double the rent.

You’ve got to have a plan.

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