The Coronavirus Recession and What It Means for Developers
swyx.io
swyx.io
I'm mainly leaving because the new opportunity is more exciting. But between the economic downturn and the "AI autumn", I'm definitely feeling like I made the right decision.
The new company is small but solid, unbeholden to investors, and it provides a very tangibly valuable service to an industry which itself provides a very tangibly valuable product that basically everyone needs. So it feels like a good place to be when the storm hits.
if you wouldn't mind sharing, what do they build/provide?
They provide a dashboard that helps electricity transmission companies make better bids on transmission contracts.
On the other hand, VC money seems to operate on a different sphere and logic, that it will probably continue to be hungry for risk, in search of the big payoff.
The article makes a good point about considering our economic dependency chain. If there's a recession (with the pandemic as a possible contributing factor), surely those chains will be shaken to shed some "weight" - those areas which are not clearly providing tangible, immediate business value.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Corporations use down cycles to shed employees. And often they will hire contractors.
yep, altho i will caveat we've basically never seen how mature FAANG act in a recession, given the long growth we've had since before they become the megacorps they are today.
but its a near certainty if FAANG is laying off folks then the smaller co's will be bleeding heavier. so the ordinal ranking of impact holds.
also i expect ex-FAANG folks have an easier go of picking up contract/freelance work given the multiple agencies focused on connecting ex-FAANG devs.
every company of more than about 100 people has some dead weight. Often, low level managers know who they are. In good times, it might not be worth doing anything much about it. In bad times, the rest-and-vesters are out.
Well... at a well-run company, it works that way. At a less-well-run company, they instead squeeze everyone with more work and more hours and less benefits and no raises, figuring that some folks will leave and do the downsizing for them. This is a losing strategy, though, because you lose the best people first that way.
It was an hourly position, but they started doing 'required' overtime; 66 hours a week for an hourly person was still 'cheaper' than hiring another person.
And yeah. As a result we had a whole team did 50-60 hour work weeks for 17-23$/hr (lol, being paid 23$ an hour to do C#, LISP, entry level Oracle and SQL server DBA alongside drafting.) Physical and mental health injuries happened across the team.
They also took away our holiday pay, and changed the PTO structure so that 1st year employees didn't even have enough PTO to cover being paid for the holidays.
Yes, they lost most of their good people. I was among the first wave to go when the economy in my area started picking back up (We didn't really start to recover here till 2012-2013.)
> We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support. We focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their people: if one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would the manager try hard to keep them from leaving? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are promptly and respectfully given a generous severance package so we can find someone for that position that makes us an even better dream team
Existing ongoing projects still need to be delivered and are usually chronically understaffed so the hiring stop adds even more pressure and gives the justification for bringing in consultants.
The whole thing usually plays out like this: investor meeting where cost cutting is a top priority. Agreement to slash all permanent hiring budgets and put new hiring plans on hold. This cascades down the chain with engineering departments revising their projections and raising alarm about risks to not meeting deadlines for existing projects. Budget gets approved for onboarding freelancers.
For myself, I was at a startup that was clearly failing (for reasons utterly unrelated to the economy), and jumped ship.
I found a solid dev position in under 30 days in the fall of 2008, right at the peak of the crash, and then moved to a better one at the end of 2010.
Some companies instituted hiring freezes and others had layoffs. Many companies terminated all of their engineering contractors.
Overall, it was a time where you had to be able to demonstrate your usefulness, and you could still lose your job to unluckiness, if your whole division was tossed.
2008-2010 was not a time for "rest and vest" to be a viable strategy. Folks who looked like they were doing that were always the in the first round of layoffs.
It was bad...
- Interviews required an IQ test (litterally some IQ test, where had to recognize numeric and geometrical patterns).
- Had to pay airline ticket to go to an interview, was never re-reimbursed (because the person who worked on the position I interviewed, decided to come back .. .so the recruiting agency did not re-reimburse)
- 60K per-year jobs (US) , required a 2 day take-home-and-code test.
12+ years of C++ would get you 40$ per hour, 3 months contract.
a PHP job with 2 year experience, required computerized test with about 60 or so questions.
Most resumes you send would never receive a reply. Recruiters were just building up their databases, and posted, most-likely fake job opportunities.
stuff like that...