
The Coronavirus Recession and What It Means for Developers - rileywatkins
https://www.swyx.io/writing/coronavirus-recession/
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_bxg1
I'm currently about to change jobs. The company I'm leaving is a small AI
company with much of its business coming in the form of speculative
investments/proof-of-concept contracts from large corporations with research
budgets.

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.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
> unbeholden to investors, and it provides a very tangibly valuable service to
> an industry which itself provides a very tangibly valuable product

if you wouldn't mind sharing, what do they build/provide?

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brundolf
This is the company:
[http://www.marginalunit.com/panorama.html](http://www.marginalunit.com/panorama.html)

They provide a dashboard that helps electricity transmission companies make
better bids on transmission contracts.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
thanks for the link. looks like very cool and interesting place. I bet it's
also recession proof. congratulations and also good luck it sure looks
exciting :)

~~~
_bxg1
Thanks :)

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elcapitan
I'm working in a travel startup, so this is quite scary. I hope that travel
picks up quickly once the initial hit is ingested. But honestly right now I
worry more about the health of older relatives than my job as a developer.

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ErikAugust
“FAANG types aren't going to be as affected as early stage startup types or
freelancer types.”

I wouldn’t be so sure. Corporations use down cycles to shed employees. And
often they will hire contractors.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Given how difficult it is for FAANG to hire highly qualified engineers, I
really doubt it. These companies are sitting on mountains of cash.

~~~
vanniv
True, but...

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.

~~~
to11mtm
I had to deal with this in the first recession.

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.)

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spopovich
I’m curious, as someone who wasn’t in this field in 2008, what was that period
like for devs?

~~~
jdlyga
I started in 2008. People weren't changing jobs very often. You didn't see
signing bonuses, or having multiple offers from top companies. It was like
having a normal job. There really wasn't bootcamps or a crazy startup culture
at that time. Most people I worked with got into it because they loved
computers or programming their whole lives. But in general, compared to the
horror stories I hear about the dot com crash, it was nothing.

~~~
Hydraulix989
If you started working at Google, Amazon, or especially, Facebook (a bit more
of a stretch) in 2008, you would be pretty happy right now.

~~~
almost_usual
Depends on if you held the equity or sold immediately. Seems like people sell
as soon as they vest nowadays.

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almost_usual
I didn't even think about the Airbnb IPO until I read this, pretty horrible
timing for them.

~~~
ErikAugust
I think that window had closed regardless. Maybe nail-gunned shut now, but I
don’t think it was ever going to happen.

~~~
Hydraulix989
I'd love to invest in temporarily cheaply-priced Airbnb shares right now.

~~~
redis_mlc
Until they solve the "I'm the condo owner so I have the right to broadcast
naked fotos of your wife and daughters over the Internet" b.s., I wouldn't use
or invest in Airbnb in any capacity.

~~~
netsharc
Airbnb has more scumbaggery than just this, so I'm not really sad about their
complacent employees not getting their stock options...

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gentleman11
Not familiar with the author. Do they have a track record for predicting
things like this, or are they just speculating?

