Ask HN: Software engineers, what was your experience during the 08/09 recession?

I'd been founding a startup at the time and decided that if I wanted any income for the next couple years I should probably look for a job. Ended up getting hired by Google despite the press reporting they were in a hiring freeze.

It was...a good decision, but I sometimes wonder if it could've been better. Financially I did really well, because my stock options were granted at the bottom of the market in 2009, and I got to work on a bunch of really cool stuff with really smart teammates, and I'm also glad to have worked at Google in the 09-11 period when they still had a fair bit of the old culture in them. Plus in 09 everybody was just glad to have a job, any job, and it felt like the rat race fell away for a couple years. My rent didn't budge for the first 3 years I was in California. I've heard that there may be a reputation bump from getting hired at Google in 2009 (since they hired so few people), but I haven't looked for a job since then, so I dunno how true that is.

OTOH, I look at people who did keep going with their startups, and actually accelerated into the discomfort, and sometimes I wonder if I made the wrong choice. The class of startups & computing projects released during the 08/09 recession includes DropBox, AirBnB, Thumbtack, WhatsApp, Bitcoin, Node.js, Angular, and several you haven't heard of (sometimes they were started beforehand, but this is when they started getting adoption). And my plan-B if I didn't get into Google was to go all-in on Android development. People who actually did that in 2009 did pretty well, because it was a time when the huge markets hadn't yet been picked clean and the hardware was getting better every year.

The VCs that were funding the startup I worked for got spooked and demanded an immediate reduction in force; I was one of the programmers that got hit.

The market the company was in didn't shrink, and they kept on making money, so the VCs were definitely not the all-seeing oracles that day :-)

Personally: the Seattle-area housing market shrank (and has since recovered), which didn't affect me because I already had a house. And I found a new job pretty quick.

Enterprise tech jobs where still in demand, the startups cooled down for awhile and I remember a lot of folks losing free parking, snacks, etc. if you were in the NYC area and didn’t have a job then your pay took a haircut. Many many many financial tech jobs where cut to the tune of 80k workers flooding the marketplace at once. I saw wages plateau for almost 4 years during that time, I did witness an influx of hires to the DC area for government contract work which proved lucrative if you wanted to go overseas.

But I was job hopping from 05-08 and didn’t blink an eye leaving in 2011. Of my friends who couldn’t find a job during this time the one thing that was common was that they could not move and were in a place like Michigan or Rhode Island where tech jobs don’t grow on trees. Recessions are the best time to startup and grow a solid base for investor excitement during the next boom cycle

Just graduated college. Got a job before I graduated (Windows support at a bank), so it didn't impact me at all. However, the company I worked for laid off a bunch of people that year, so people definitely got affected.

Some of my non-engineering friends had a really rough time finding a job, though.

I fared well during the recession overall. The company I worked for was affected more than the overall economy since we were an MBA prep company so I figured with the collapse there would be fewer jobs for MBAs in the coming years. I was planning on quitting in November 2008 and I actually handed my letter of resignation to my boss on a Friday, but he told me to take the weekend to reconsider. What he knew then, and what I was about to find out, was that they were laying off most of the tech team, including me. By not resigning I was able to get a 6 week severance. I took a vacation to Cancun before starting a better job. I lasted at the new company about a year before jumping ship for a 45% raise in November 2009.

I was in high school at the time, and it encouraged me to pick a lucrative career track. I did have an interest in programming -- I didn't choose it solely for the money, but it made me prioritize financial security. Seeing our financial markets melt was impactful. I remember my economics teacher showing on the projector a graph of the Dow on one of the large three-digit (possibly four-digit) down days and talking about the significance of it. It shaped how I view money, and would be somewhat attribute to my interest in achieving financial independence before standard retirement age.

I had friends tell me I was taking an unreasonable risk by quitting my job at Microsoft early in 2009, but I couldn't take it anymore and left anyway. I took a couple months off to work on a Burning Man project, spent a year doing contract work and messing around with electronics, then got a job doing firmware. It was fine. I would have made more money if I'd stayed, but not enough to make the experience worthwhile.