> What companies or roles will be more resilient? Defense or any project fulfilling federal contracts.
Healthcare is another safe bet.
Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
211–220 of 576 posts
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#212Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#213Go get your MS/PhD. By the time you finish, the market will be stronger, and so will your resume The Georgia Tech online MS is good and about $7k total. You can pay for it working at Starbucks
Getting a PhD for this reason is an absolutely terrible idea. A PhD is an apprenticeship to be a university professor. It's only sometimes, incidentally, helpful for the would-be engineer, and it's very rarely more lucrative than staying in the job market. And, it's generally absolute hell for a few years. Most people don't make it through.
If the OP had any business doing an PhD he would already know it---he would either have a burning desire to become a professor, or he would have a burning desire to do intellectual research. In the latter case, a modern PhD will probably still be a huge disappointment.
There are tons and tons of pieces online arguing exactly this; I would encourage anyone considering a PhD to seek them out and consider their observations carefully.
This comment is pretty US centric, but also applies to some extent to other countries.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The extremely high paid FANG income is a thing of the past, already down 50% ytd. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.
I have yet to see comp go down at the high end.
High end tends to be equity heavy, and equity has dropped in value massively this year. Not sure how common it is to issue refresher grants of RSUs to top up the total comp.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#215I'm not surprised (unfortunately, and I am truly sorry for this). Don't look to the 2008 recession for an idea of how things may go. Look to the 2000 (Tech Bubble Burst) recession. In that one, the bottom dropped out of the tech market. Web designers were especially hard hit. I have family that works for Intel, and they say that Intel tends to actually increase hiring in bear markets. I suspect that's because they ar…
> Look to the 2000 (Tech Bubble Burst) recession. In that one, the bottom dropped out of the tech market. Web designers were especially hard hit.
I wonder if it's gonna be mobile app designers/devs this time round?
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In one, you can make fantastic money but the interviews are famously difficult, the culture can be borderline abusive, and layoffs are a way of life. These generalizations are untrue for a lot of companies, and for a lot of teams. Software companies, even FAANGs, can be very relaxed and comfortable places to work. It all really depends on the team -- and you can end up with an abusive boss in any industry. Job secu…
Of course these are generalizations. "All models are wrong, but some are useful." I'm sure there are some laid-back jobs at startups and some stressful jobs at the Minnesota Dept. of Transportation, but I also think it is generally fair to say that those are less common than the opposite.
To explain this more clearly: what I'm trying to say is that the different parts of the software industry seem more like a bimodal distribution than a smooth one. If you think broadly of the extremes in software jobs (say, "fresh college grads making $250k+ to use cutting-edge frameworks to build a 'doordash for pet food' app" on the one hand, and "SE3s making $120k to add features to a jankety legacy application that gets manually deployed once every three months" on the other), thinking of those as separate industries is a more useful mental model than thinking of them as two ends of the same industry.
I thought this was relevant because one is more recession-proof than the other, but that's hardly the only way that they're different. So my point probably came across muddled because I was referring to a larger distinction in the industry without describing it very well.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#217This is a tough market. It will be difficult to find opportunities but if you do find an opportunity, it's more likely to be a good one.
The downside of a tech boom is that there is too much easy money floating around some companies and this causes industry standards decline. The workplace becomes political; it feels chaotic and non-meritocratic. It's easy to lose passion for your work when nobody can recognize its value and nobody cares about things like efficiency and maintainability.
I'm a senior developer with 15+ years of experience and I've recently had to accept a 2 month contract for almost half my normal pay to build a new system from scratch. Unfortunately, when experienced, highly productive developers are willing to take such huge pay cuts, it pushes all the less experienced devs out of the market completely.
I would recommend trying to join a startup or a small company (or start your own on the side). Find tech companies whose customers produce real, obvious economic value. For example; the business' main customers are in farming, mining, construction, manufacturing...
The past decade in tech has been fueled by low interest rates and massive money printing and has mostly been about zero-sum activities like surveillance and manipulation... IMO this should start to change now.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
The extremely high paid FANG income is a thing of the past, already down 50% ytd. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.
Salaries at FANG have been cut 50% in the past 12 months? I have to give that a massive Citations Needed.
Total comp has likely come down, not salaries.
If a significant part of your comp is in stock, then yeah, that portion of your pay is down potentially 70% or more in six months (Netflix). There’s probably some employees at FAANG that are negative on their equity.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
The extremely high paid FANG income is a thing of the past, already down 50% ytd. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.
Salaries at FANG have been cut 50% in the past 12 months? I have to give that a massive Citations Needed.
They mean total comp, which is probably true since lots of people include their stock price appreciation when they talk about their total comp.
Re: Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
#220Interest rates have changed how easy money is, now unit economics has to work and the blitzscale and monopolize model doesn't have the capital to fuel itself
That's why classic blue chips are up and all the creative accounting, exotic pricing, complex funny money stuff is crashing hard. Anything that's not super easy to understand is doing terrible.
Look at who's up over the past 6 months. Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Coors, General Mills, Campbell Soup, Eli Lilly - companies with solid conventional reliable products and not a bunch of adventurous moon shots. Even PayPal, which is normally a pretty "safe" tech company is -60% YTD.