

Laid Off? It's Good for You and Good for the Tech Industry - dlnovell
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-08/st_essay

======
jacquesm
The disconnection between the writer and reality is really striking.

If you're laid off it is never 'good for you', and it certainly isn't good for
the industry.

Plenty of talent that was thrown out at some point in this crisis due to no
fault of theirs is not going to try their hand again at a job that left them
with 0 security when times were hard, that talent will be lost forever.

And if you have a mortgage, kids to put through school or college and the
usual family expenses then being laid off is a crisis, not 'good for you' in
any way because making a facebook or a twitter application is not going to put
bread on your table in time for your house not to be repossessed.

It's ok to suggest that for some individuals there are opportunities in being
laid off but for the most part any forced leave from a job that you may have
liked and performed well in and that kept you alive is a tragedy.

It could easily ruin someones life for years to come.

~~~
ardit33
I have to say that usually it is marginal talent that has hard time finding a
job.

Crisis like this is when the chaff is separated from the wheat. They filter
out people that shouldn't be in he bussiness.

I remember my car mechanic was a DBA back in 2000. He read a SQL book, and a 3
months class, and bam, he was DBA for some company, which eventually went
under. He admited me he didn't know what he was doing, but at the time you
will get hired right away if you new something.

He owns a car repair garage now, and is pulling up to 500k of profit a year.
Who knows, maybe he would have been a great DBA with enough experience, but in
this case he clearly profited more by doing what he was good at.

Kinda like CS 121, which was the hardest class in college, and a lot of people
failed. They usually switched majors, to bussiness, or information systems, or
something else they could do.

I thought it was good, as those people were evidently there b/c they had heard
all those stories about startups and being rich, while had no passion or
abilities for programming whatsover.

~~~
tptacek
The skills required to quickly find a new job aren't even related to the
skills required to execute on a software team.

~~~
cema
Succinct and correct.

Besides, even good software teams are now losing people simply because the
money is not there, either in financing or for the customers (thereby reducing
the customer base). They do not hire -- on the contrary, some have to lay good
people off. This is not good. It's the opposite of good.

------
MicahWedemeyer
_And there are still plenty of opportunities out there for Valley types:
Facebook widgets, iPhone apps, Twitter tools, and cloud services are
exploding._

That's where they lost me. Laid off? No money? Kids starving? Make a new
Twitter app!

~~~
ardit33
Hey, that's what I am doing right now.

My previous company shut down. I got 4 job offers withing 2 weeks, and right
now I am transfering my H-1B papers.

Since that takes few weeks, I am working on something fun. A sms backup
system, that automatically backs up all your sms, and makes them search-able
from a small portal.

Using Python for the backend, and java/objective-c on the client side. I
choose python b/c I would like to learn it better, as in all my jobs it has
been all java.

So, I probably won't make any money out of it, but I will come with some solid
server side Python experience that I can put it on my resume.

Meanwhile I still have to tell recruiters "sorry I already accepted an offer".
Got a call from google, and fb.

Bottom line, if you are good, there is really no recession for you. And
getting laid off is not that bad. (this is my first time). My previous company
was going no-where, and my skills would have been better used somewhere else,
where I can produce real economic value.

~~~
bmelton
For what it's worth, that sounds nice, and disruptive, but possibly short-
lived. Someone recently asked me how I enjoyed using Google Voice, and while I
didn't immediately have an answer, after thinking about it, I decided that I
liked it mostly because it allowed me to keep my SMS messages in the cloud.

Many people use SMS to get actual work done, as I do, and it surprises me that
nobody seems to care to back them up (or at least, there doesn't seem to be
much in the way of allowing that) -- but Google Voice gets rid of the problem
altogether, in that they're only transiently on my phone, and always stored in
the Googleplex (deletions are 'archived', similar to Gmail).

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Just because Google's doing it with Google Voice doesn't mean someone else's
solution will automatically be "short lived".

Most of the world has still never heard of Google Voice (let alone "the
cloud"). If he makes an SMS backup product, and sells it as that, I'm sure
there will be plenty of people who would be interested, regardless of what
Google is doing.

~~~
bmelton
I didn't mean to imply that google was going to put him out of business, so
much as I meant that I think carriers will likely follow Google's lead
eventually -- They already have your SMS messages, call logs and voice mail
data -- exposing them to the web effectively competes with a large portion of
Google's Voice offering, and doesn't require significant overhaul of anything
for carriers to implement. Of course, I could be wrong, but my point wasn't
that he was sure to fail because he was competing with google as much as I
feel things are trending that way already.

Besides, it's not like competing with Google is unwinnable either, it's just
very, very hard to do.

------
ph0rque
_Paul Boutin (paul.boutin@nytimes.com) was a_ Wired _senior editor until we
fired him in 2001_

~~~
JBiserkov
the ladder, the ladder is on FIRE!

I wonder what will come after it? <http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html>

------
djb_hackernews
I laugh. I'm not exactly laid off, but I quit a pretty decent dev job in
January to do some traveling. Since then I built a gmaps mashup for a library,
a wordpress twitter widget, a custom wordpress widget, and $80 worth of elance
work. I'm in the process of learning python/django in the hopes of releasing a
pretty fun twitter app with no revenue potential. I can say of all of the
technologies I used to build these things, I had zero previous experience, and
still don't have enough to list it on my resume in good conscience. So where
does that leave me? My travels are coming to an end and I'm scared to death
I'll never find a job.

