A Developer's Guide to Surviving the Coronapocalypse
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I’m usually a cloud true believer and choose to emphasize letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so developers can concentrate on building new features instead of spending extra hours babysitting infrastructure. But, since most software engineers are salaried, this is the time to trade time for money instead of the other way around if your company is struggling.
I’m fortunate to work at a B2B company where our clients are large health systems so for us it’s business as usual. We actually think we will grow.
Anyway, I’m half expecting to see another massive bailout for hospitals, or the government just buy them outright in about a year.
Hospitals for better or worse have negligible presence with lobbyists and won't receive the windfalls that fossil fuel, airlines, airline manufacturers, and cruise lines will.
You notice that now Trump is talking about expanding Medicare, increasing unemployment benefits, and reopening ACA enrollment and you don’t hear a peep from conservatives talking about socialism.
It’s true, the definition of socialism is when the government is helping “them” - not you.
Not every company just runs a three tier web app behind a load balancer.
The end goal isn't to tell us any useful information, it's just a list of vague best practices that could be packaged up into a motivational swindle - in this case, piggybacking a global pandemic with content that isn't particularly related.
And of course it’s targeted at the audience that has the least amount of likelihood of having any significant trouble due to the pandemic.
Software developers:
In high demand (and not a healthcare worker?) Check!
Can work from home? Check!
High income? Check!
Making a guide for that kind of person’s “survival” is pretty much an insult to the doctors and nurses who are fighting not only for their patients’ survival but their own.
For example, they suggest moving to someplace with lower cost of living, surely sage advice!
I've seen some baffling things here on HN too, such as people preferring to only be informed using push notifications about the crisis, personalized for their area, nothing else, because that's more convenient than looking up information, or the other day, deciding to block COVID-19 related news entirely, instead of selecting a trusted news source and rationing their exposure to the media.
So yeah, I'm one of the people who have started removing and blocking things that are mentioning COVID-19, since I can't really do anything about it. Once something actionable comes up, I'll hear it in the official press conferences from my country's government.
I guess luckily, my HN blocker only blocks mentions of COVID-19 and "corona virus", so the keyword "Coronapocalypse" managed to get through, and here I am...
Everyone else needs to read the news (5 minutes a day is enough), because it may contain important information. Consider how you may miss a changed bus schedule announced on a local news site with "due to coronavirus" in the title. Same thing about the local supermarket, you may get home without food while exposing yourself and your family to additional risk. You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.
Reading the news is crucial for most of us during this period, we just have to do it responsibly.
Here's also a great explanation for why reading the news could make a difference for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783044
> Plus I learned by the news that losing sense of smell and taste was a likely indicator of Covid-19. I got tested and discovered I was positive.
Cutting all news is a good strategy for some people for improving mental health. Just like anyone can have a cabinet full of chocolate and just control themselves to each a small piece twice a week, but it's much more efficient to just not have chocolate at all at home.
Also, the general tone of people that don't want to read news anymore is that they personally don't want it for themselves only. So, that's unrelated to people that consider it crucial and want to do it responsibly.
Lastly, I've seen this desire of consuming less or no news in a lot of people that are not the "HN crowd" or privileged people in terms of money.
That was your experience before this crisis. I've got hold of such information from a local news site a week ago, while official sites remained unchanged for a couple more days. I'm sure there are places where everything is well oiled, but for most of us things don't just snap into place and we need to be aware of our surroundings as much as it's tolerable for our mental health.
As I said, all of things that impact us in our country, is told by us from the national government. Such as how you should act when going to the supermarket, if you need to present papers, what reasons you're allowed to be outside for and so on. Going through the news to get that information is just introducing unnecessary middlemen for information you get from either press conferences or straight from the government websites.
Everyone does not need to read the news. Follow the official guidelines, that's enough, and read them from the source. Then for the people who want to follow the news, follow it. But it's not a requirement for staying alive. At least where I live (YMMV).
> You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.
Yeah, if they made it illegal to be outside without official papers, the government press conference would mention this + there would be information about this on the government websites. You're putting too much importance on "news" when there are official sources to hear/read from.
when it comes to more complex things like "how bad is coronavirus about to be in the west?" reading the news for five minutes isn't nearly enough. for each story, you need to read writeups from several different publications before you can reconstitute anything like an accurate picture of what is happening. pick any important story and read the corresponding articles in the ny times, wsj, and maybe the washington post. it's really staggering how differently they present the facts (and which ones they choose to present at all). it takes a lot of work to come away from reading the news more informed rather than less.
Thanks for sticking with us, explaining your viewpoint further :)
current downvote: -2
as someone else has said: how many white collar tech workers can re-locate at the drop of a hat?
> As others have discussed, one can minimize the impact of a recession by maximizing one’s personal runway, which involves cost-cutting measures (including, potentially, re-location to areas with a lower cost of living).
in context, this is a brief aside where he's explaining that he's not going to cover general cost-cutting in your personal life. it's tangential to the topic addressed by the article.
i don't understand at all what you're talking about. privilege isn't about you. it's exactly about other people relative to you and empathizing with them despite being that much more privileged.
Your workforce doesn’t get killed. But most tech engineers are young anyways, so they should survive this virus.
And your workforce is decentralized, so you can have business continuity in a disaster scenario.
1. Build skills
2. Have cash
3. Network
On the cash front, in addition to the importance of having reserves, I'd suggest that the importance of having multiple revenue streams has never been clearer.
During the last recession, I was a full time software engineer, a part time fitness instructor/personal trainer and had real estate holdings.
Guess how my alternate income streams worked out when no one was spending money? I sold off all of my rental real estate (in an area that still hasn’t recovered), I stopped trying to get personal fitness classes and scaled back teaching to just a “working hobby” and doubled down in software engineering, building skills and a network.
When the company I worked for finally did collapse in late 2010, I was able to get a couple of contracts until I found a full time gig.
This is true. A couple on my block are an architect, and a yoga instructor. Two very diverse income streams.
Now both are unemployed.
A guy I sold a web site to was one of those people who was big on diversity of income.
His portfolio covered everything from hotel services to restaurants to antiques restoration to a couple of small factories. All are closed. His diverse income is gone.
In software engineering, you don’t need “multiple income streams” to stay solvent. You just need a set of skills that are in sync with the market, good interviewing techniques, a strong network, and cash to tide you over and keep your expenses reasonable. This time is not a recession. It’s a true worldwide epidemic. But during “normal” recessions, if you have what I outlined above, someone somewhere will hire you at least as a contractor at some rate.
Of course if you overly specialized it might be harder.
The dot com bust wasn’t that bad if you were just a regular old enterprise developer working at a profitable company that wasn’t directly or indirectly dependent on VC money. Even in 2008, there were companies hiring hired gun contractors at lower rates.
I'd say that even more important is picking the right employer. The next time you apply for a job, ask what the company did during the virus. If it didn't take care of its employees during COVID, it's not going to suddenly be a good company now.
If the company didn't exist during COVID, I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask what the leaders were doing during COVID and how they treated their people at those companies.
I haven’t seen any evidence that the company I work for isn’t ethical or as employee focus as they can be. But things happen, management changes, companies get acquired, the market changes etc.
Good for you. That is not the reality faced by tens of millions of Americans, and billions of people worldwide.
Reality lies in between I think. Most folks need some security, but don't have it?
But “billions of people” worldwide don’t have the luxury of multiple job openings where they can be picky about their employer.