I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#291

Post by icedchai » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

diN0bot wrote: post #276

icedchai wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started around a similar time frame, and was around during the dot-com boom. One dot-bomb company was "growing so fast" (lots of hype, almost no revenues...) that it would hire almost anyone off the street. We also hired a lot of good people who had their skills misapplied for developing a product that made little sense. $millions were wasted. People today would be astonished at the tech interviews back then. It wa…

Hiring processes have really changed since then. What do you think of them now?

I think they've swung too far in the other direction. A recent interview experience from the past decade was 6 hour long interviews, 2 to 3 people in each, tons of whiteboard coding.

Somewhere there is a happy medium.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#292

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #55

barry-cotter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average Bachelor’s graduates has $38K in debt in graduation, the price of a new car. To get to $100K you usually need to go to graduate school.

My college had a 30k/year tuition. 4 years of that comes out to 120k. Your figure assumes >70% of costs are paid without debt. 30k/year is common now for an undergraduate degree from a state school with dorm.

1. 30k/year is REALLY high for tuition. Most state flagships -- which are some of the best universities in the entire world -- aren't that expensive. UIUC, definitely one of the best CS departments in the world, has tuition that's about half that per year [1]. And that's a top-tier state flagship research university; a bit of an overkill for any but the most ambitious (phd or md or jd or elite co.)-bound students. The regional campuses, which do an excellent job at preparing you for typical entry level industry gigs in most fields, have tuition closer to $10k/year [2]. If you want a "normal" life -- decent salary in exchange for a 40 hour work week, in a relatively normal stress environment, and without attending a top-tier graduate program -- don't go to a top-tier state flagship.

2. Most private universities do have sticker prices in that range, but a) why go non-elite private (e.g., mid-low tier liberal arts colleges) since they're usually not even as good as comparable public schools, and b) almost no one actually pays the sticker price at private universities. The average discount factor at private universities is around 50% [3].

3. It's definitely possible to make >$10K each year while doing university full time. Even very conservative estimates -- state minimum wage and only working summers/weekends with no overtime -- put the number north of $8K [4].

4. Living at home is often an option (not always, but the percentage of people who can't live at home and also don't qualify for need-based aid has to be pretty small).

5. Four years is an upper bound, not a requirement! College-ready students can and should transfer credits from high school AP, IB, or college credit courses; one of those three options is available in the vast majority of US high schools. Students who are not college-ready should start off at community college, which, again, brings the price down substantially.

So, for example, if you:

* go to your local branch campus of a state university like SIU-E or UMSL,

* live at home,

* work a minimum wage job for 40 hours over the summer and on the most weekends during the school year [4], and

* come in with sophomore standing OR do you first year at community college

then you can graduate with a very modest amount of debt (less than a used car, or possibly none at all). Cutting any one of those assumptions still keeps you well below $100K and possibly much lower than even $30K.

Plus, some of those assumptions are conservative. E.g., for most of that time you should be able to make substantially more than minimum wage by taking internships, tutoring ($20/hr+ is typically a "low" rate), etc. Scholarships and fellowships are typically available as well.

College is far too expensive in the USA, but you really have to be a huge outlier to graduate from undergrad with $100K in debt. And it's still possible in many parts of the country to graduate with "used car" worth of debt or even no debt at all.

Part of our "college affordability" problem is real, but part of the problem is a "buying luxury goods with a credit card" problem. Attending one of the best universities in the world and living in their dorms and staying for four full years and not working full time over the summers + weekends during the school year... that's the most expensive option possible. There are plenty of much less expensive options for most college students in the US.

[1] https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/tuition

[2] https://www.siue.edu/paying-for-college/tuition-and-fees/und...

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-report...

[4] (408.2512) + (168.25(52-12-3)) = $8,844

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#293

Post by grandridge » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

andreilys wrote: post #234

seisvelas wrote: post #207

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at but hacki…

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked” Also known as survivorship bias.

Also knows as being valuable

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#294

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #212

VBprogrammer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a pet theory that what we're essentially doing is running a huge experiment where we select for the least dangerous strains of the coronavirus. People who get a mild flu or no symptoms at all are less well quarantined and are significantly more likely to pass it on to other people. People who get the worst symptoms are tightly quarantined in hospital, reducing their chances of passing on the worst forms of the…

That's exactly what happens. Diseases don't "want" to actually kill their hosts; it kills them too. If evolution was selecting for more dangerous variants over time, we'd all be long dead; multicellular life might not even be possible. But it's actually selecting for things that live in the host indefinitely and spread over long periods of time, which leave the host alive in order to do so. In the long term, the coro…

That's why herpesviridae are so successful. In the US a full half of folks have HSV-1 (cold sores).

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#295

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #289

meowzero wrote: post #204

I too graduated with a CS degree from a highly ranked technical University. It was probably the worst time for recent graduate with a CS degree. You hear news of all jobs going to India. Nobody in the US was hiring developers. In fact, they were getting all laid off. I had to scrape by taking odd jobs here and there. I worked as a short-order cook, made jewelry in a factory, worked at a UPS warehouse, etc. It felt ho…

This is part of the reason we are / were paid so much recently. Hardly any young people went into technology from dot-com until around 12 or so (unless they were passionate about it), precisely because everyone was telling kids that programming was so easily outsourced that you'll never make money at it. There's a distinct dips in the number of 30-40 year olds in technology. There are plenty of older people, and ther…

$15/hr at mine, although if I include freelancing prior to that it's probably closer to $8. It's kind of nice. My floor is so incredibly low that the "scary times" don't look so scary.

CS was a contrarian career bet in the few years after dotcom; you didn't do it if you were listening to the wise old men and wanted a good paying job. Realizing that opportunity -- or, more commonly, doing what you wanted to and not worrying about the $, paid off incredibly well for those who took advantage from between 2004ish and today. I don't think fortunes will change for our cohort; there's still a huge dearth of principal engineers in pretty much every subarea of software engineering.

The enrollment surge also hasn't yet effected CS PhDs, because undergrad enrollment wasn't matched by a corresponding growth in phd enrollment. That might change in the next 5 years.

But the entry level positions seem extraordinarily competitive at the moment; I've never had this many qualified applicants (and that goes for before covid19 as well). The only saving grace is that more and more non-programming positions require some programming skills, and those folks seem to have a hard time recruiting/hiring.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#296

Post by andarleen » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

non-entity wrote: post #159

andarleen wrote: post #63

I like this kind of articles. I graduated during the 2008 crash and thrived as a programmer. It is probably because i spent most of my youth on IRC learning about all sorts of topics, mostly web related, while others waited for knowledge to be handed down by professors. If you are passionate you are likely to gain deep knowledge about your topic of interest. Deep knowledge makes you highly desirable for most employer…

> Deep knowledge makes you highly desirable for most employers. Anyone sitting out there anxious about what may be, now is the time to sink deep into your domain and become better at it. Is this not more risky during a recession, when you're niche may not be very desirable in the economic climate?

Thats a good question - but I dont think it would me more risky than being anxious. Ideally one would chose a domain likely to be in demand.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#297

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #208

brianmcc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he's not saying "everything's currently super" he's saying "things are truly crappy right now but they will get better". I don't see what's tone deaf there. He's pitching a message of long-term-reassurance at a time when many people might find that comforting - specifically the younger folks who've never seen cycles of down/up/down-again/up-again.

The fundamental lesson of the Great Depression was that there are no cycles. Being down does not mean a later upswing with certainty. That we haven’t had a GD since 1929 is in large part due to an ability to constantly grow markets with cheap oil energy and new markets. But more importantly the US had a lot of power and regulatory oversight to keep it from happening. All of that is no longer the case, and we’re in da…

> due to an ability to constantly grow markets with cheap oil energy and new markets. But more importantly the US had a lot of power and regulatory oversight to keep it from happening. All of that is no longer the case

Growth: emerging markets have decades of gangbusters growth ahead of them. More people will exit extreme poverty than ever before in the coming decades. China will transition from middle income to rich in our lifetimes, introducing hundreds of millions of new rich country consumers.

Federal power and responsiveness: The fed expanded its balance sheet in a rather incredible and history-making way. The CARES act is one of the largest subsidies ever.

Cheap oil energy: POTUS is currently begging SA and Russia to increase the price of oil. Meanwhile, alternative energy sources get cheaper every year.

A GD is possible, but not for those reasons.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#298

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #287

CydeWeys wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's enough social distancing going on in NYC right now to prevent the majority of people from ever getting it. It doesn't seem likely that the social distancing will be let up enough (and subsequently not clamped back down) to the point of allowing most people to get it.

On the surface that seems to be true. NYC has ~8.4 million people minus those who left the city. ~1% of the population has already tested positive (81,803), and compared to yesterday (81,803 - 76,876) = 4,727 people are testing positive per day which would take years before everyone gets it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_N... More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth…

For sure we're undercounting. I had it and I'm not part of any official count because there's no way to get tested. My cohabiting girlfriend almost certainly had it, but she was entirely asymptomatic. Once you factor in all the asymptomatic people, in addition to all the symptomatic people who didn't end up hospitalized and thus likely couldn't get tested, the multiplier on the confirmed cases could easily be significantly more than 10X.

Pessimistically it seems that something like up to 10% of the city's population got it by the time that almost everything shut down, and now that almost everything is shut down, the spread has been vastly, vastly curtailed, as we see from new hospital admissions figures (which don't suffer from the same kinds of underreporting bias).

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#299

Post by novok » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

andreilys wrote: post #234

seisvelas wrote: post #207

I started during the 2008 recession. I think the people who hurt the most back then were the people who'd just attended 6 week Ruby on Rails bootcamps and gotten 70k/year jobs (which was a cliche at the time). Suddenly, that was no longer realistic. And even among them, the passionate people found a way. I got into tech with no education during the recession just on psychotic passion alone. I was working at but hacki…

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked” Also known as survivorship bias.

Survivorship bias is a valid thing to bring up when the odds are low. When the odds are fairly high, it isn't very useful. "A tech job, somewhere" is not a high bar.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#300

Post by chefandy » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #9

geoffmunn wrote: post #5

I graduated from university at the exact moment the dot com bust occurred, and the job market went from fizzing to non-existent in the space of a few weeks. I ended up working at a local charity, and then entering into a business incubator but for a couple of years I had no money to speak of. If I felt rich, I'd have McDonalds for lunch. On the other hand, I was living in a cool part of town with a group of people wh…

I imagine its worse now with the Student debt bubble - too many people with 100k in student loans.

Also, housing costs are astronomical. There is no splitting a cool spot with some roommates in the cool part of town, anymore. These days, if you work in tech and feel rich eating McDonald's, your commute is at least 2 hours.