Ask HN: For posterity what’s your predictions about how/when this will play out? - drenginian
======
austincheney
I suspect quarantines and restrictions will last at least 3 months and will
extend for longer based upon the state of spread and hospital volume. The
current evidence from the medical experts suspects the pandemic will last
about 18 months.

While health and social restrictions are serious immediate concerns the state
of the economy will ultimately be more seriously harmed. Consider that
industries like restaurants, events, movies, education, and so forth are
basically shut down. The transportation industry is operating on minimal life
support and oil prices are nearing negative prices. That is a lot of people
out of work. Our economy is primarily based on consumer shopping and right now
nobody is shopping for consumer goods, which means many other businesses will
fail and many more people will be out of work. There are already many
developers who are losing their jobs.

Things will be tough for a while. I suspect the economy will recover slowly as
this will likely be far worse than 2008. Even with the various economic
stimulus packages released by the government we are nearing depression
conditions. If you hadn't made precautions for this 2 months ago you will be
feeling some disruptions.

The reason why I think this will be substantially worse than 2008 is that 2008
was, for the most part, a loss of wealth. Then there was an oil spike that
caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, especially in transportation, that
rippled through to other industries. Unemployment spiked to double digits but
it didn't happen quickly and it did not have a huge overall impact. The
largest impact is that many wealthy people lost a large amount of investment
wealth and many poor people lost homes they should have never qualified for in
the first place.

In contrast this time a greater diversity of industries will be economically
killed very quickly. The warning signs were there months ago, but nobody was
listening. When looking at the market you can see that investment markets
spiked to high values the first week of January and then entered high
volatility (uncertainty) for the rest of January only to start sliding through
February. February 20 was the cliff when the markets starting falling apart
and now about a month after that wide swaths of jobs are being eliminated
across the board.

I don't suspect there will be extreme panic, marshall law, or zombie
apocalypse. The government has deemed certain industries as critical to
national security such as certain segments of finance, utilities, grocery and
food distribution industries, transportation and so forth. If necessary the
government will fund those industries to keep people employed and keep
services alive. There is talk of wide-scale credit forgiveness to to slow
people from losing personal assets. So long as the medical industry is not
overwhelmed most of daily life to continue to function normally even though
many people will be destitute.

I do suspect a lot of business practices will change moving forward. Costly
industries that had the luxury of no regulation or oversight, such as
software, will likely be redefined to better maximize return on investment. I
think employers that are struggling to keep the lights on will significantly
scale back (or eliminate) marketing spend and will be trying to hire fewer
developers to accomplish more things. The rare and legendary 10x developer may
likely become the norm provided appropriate adjustments to business practices
and elimination of personnel/productivity barriers. If you are a software
developer and not a fabled 10x developer I would recommend using this time to
write open source software, study, and diversify your skill sets.

