I always get flak for this but here we go anyway: the key is to manage expectations in the short term.
First realize that the market you know is far from the norm. We were at the end of the longest bull run in history and the hottest tech job market in memory. These are things you can kiss good bye for a while: eye popping salaries with little experience, kombucha on tap and Prosecco Friday, headcount doubling every 6 months, 50% YoY stock growth...
Yes, your timing is bad and it sucks. Such is life. I graduated in 2008 into one of the worst economies in my country. Imagine living paycheck to paycheck working as a software engineer.
The good news is you have a few years of experience, so you are in a better position to weather this than a fresh grad. When the economy starts picking up again you'll be in an excellent position to take advantage of it.
This is a fact: big companies are still hiring and are very resilient. Deep pockets will take the chance to attract talent. Amazon still has a huge gap due to the great resignation and hasn't slowed down. Now is a good chance to join for a stable job during turbulent times.
This is an opinion: I truly believe many decacorns from the next generation will come out of this. The recession will clean up the undergrowth and leave room for the next rocketships to take off. Imagine being an early engineer at Google? that might be happening now. Of course the trick is to pick the right horse out of thousands.
What path you choose depends on your situation. If you want stability try big tech. If you want to play the lottery keep an eye open for startups.
I'm really skeptical of all the "sky is falling" talk. Asset prices have been wildly inflated since COVID opened the taps on QE. That they are now coming down to reality is the entire point. The Fed is doing its' job. This isn't 2008. There isn't a systemic risk. Revenues are strong, consumer spending is strong, and savings are at historical levels. A wildly inflated sector of the economy is being unwound, and there will be sore losers. But the bull case for the foreseeable future hasn't changed at all really.
I think an aspect is still true though. Many companies have been operating with an extreme growth mindset for a long time. Trying to achieve more than 40% yoy growth, getting investors to bankroll huge salaries and hiring pushes, etc. Many startups operate like this and leave sustainable profits as a problem for the future. (E.g. spend way more than revenue on hiring now and hope to be profitable later once you have more users.) That strategy relies on cash from investors.
I think these types of companies are driving the big salaries people see, which is impacting the larger hiring market. I can talk to my employer about a raise because my peers get hired at a higher rate too.
If companies adjust back into a more sustainable growth strategy, it’s likely salaries won’t continue to be as large, just because the hiring market stops driving big wage increases. And if investors aren’t willing to bankroll as much spending, companies will have to cut back on different costs if they aren’t profitable.
I think we’re still in a good career, especially at a stable company in a good financial position.
But the startup market is defined by initially unsustainable business strategies [1], so I think it’s fair to think some amount of instability is in the future if investors cut back.
1: by this I just mean the classic startup strategy which uses investor money to hire lots of devs and grow users, and then in X years, start monetizing to find profitability. It’s not sustainable until it becomes sustainable at the end, so there’s a lot of room for weird situations!
I don't think the sky is falling either. But the weather is certainly changing, and you better get that raincoat out of the closet and make sure there are no holes in it.
I graduated around the same time and I ended up getting a job in finance anyways - hard asset investments specifically. So there are actually markets that thrive during times like these and identifying them and reaching out to them is what you might want to consider doing.
I might want to add this was a programming role, not anything crazy like a quant or something like that either, and I didn't even go to school, they hired me on self-taught and that was that.
In a world where new grads can easily make 6 figure salaries as software engineers, yes. I mean, everyone I tell literally has a hard time believing I was making a poverty-level wage as a programmer.
First realize that the market you know is far from the norm. We were at the end of the longest bull run in history and the hottest tech job market in memory. These are things you can kiss good bye for a while: eye popping salaries with little experience, kombucha on tap and Prosecco Friday, headcount doubling every 6 months, 50% YoY stock growth...
Yes, your timing is bad and it sucks. Such is life. I graduated in 2008 into one of the worst economies in my country. Imagine living paycheck to paycheck working as a software engineer.
The good news is you have a few years of experience, so you are in a better position to weather this than a fresh grad. When the economy starts picking up again you'll be in an excellent position to take advantage of it.
This is a fact: big companies are still hiring and are very resilient. Deep pockets will take the chance to attract talent. Amazon still has a huge gap due to the great resignation and hasn't slowed down. Now is a good chance to join for a stable job during turbulent times.
This is an opinion: I truly believe many decacorns from the next generation will come out of this. The recession will clean up the undergrowth and leave room for the next rocketships to take off. Imagine being an early engineer at Google? that might be happening now. Of course the trick is to pick the right horse out of thousands.
What path you choose depends on your situation. If you want stability try big tech. If you want to play the lottery keep an eye open for startups.