Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession

This is one advantage of living in a (relatively) low-cost country like India. Recruiting actually picks up here when there's a recession in the US, because it's cheaper to hire here. The difference is not 10x like it used to be, but it's still at least 2-3x.

Opposite anecdote and a lot more likely to succeed than to “find a side project that can generate enough revenue to sustain your lifestyle.”

2000 - I was three years into my career and I had been looking at the market to see what were the in demand skills. I was working for a boring profitable company that was printing bills and just getting into integrating with CheckFree - the backend for most banks electronic bill payments at the time.

2008 - while I was just coming out of my “expert beginner stage”, once again I had a skillset that was in demand and a network that allowed me to find a job quickly. (4 days after being laid off)

2020 - my company had an across the board paycut. Again I spent the prior two years learning an in demand skillset and found a job paying about 33% more than I was making before the cut.

Until 2020, admittedly the jobs were unremarkable by big tech standards. But I had a comfortable life.

The first two years after my new job, I used the two year prorated signing bonus to pay off all of our debt and build a “go to hell fund”. If I get laid off tomorrow, I’m 99% sure that I could get another job or contract quickly. Fortunately, I work for $BigTech remotely and I could take a 40% pay cut without it affecting us too much.

> Imagine living paycheck to paycheck working as a software engineer

Is that supposed to be hard to imagine ? Most of the population don’t have entitlement about this.

Well, as someone who (re)entered the industry in 2003 after the fallout of the dotcom crash, one thing that helped me get a job was the fact that tons of people just straight-up abandoned the industry during that period and the pipeline of new applicants dried up. So all those people who got a CS degree or went to a bootcamp because coding looked like an easy ticket to a high paying job? Poof - gone. Not to mention a small minority of software developers just permanently left the profession. And what happened? A few years later companies were desperate for coding talent again.

The other thing is that changed was that there was way less cash being pumped into startups trying to solve every minute problem under the sun - so you could actually bootstrap product in spaces without having to compete with 2-3 Tier-1 VC-backed startups flush with cash.

Oh, and because less stuff is getting built and productized, there might be more demand for contract work. That's how I built out a resume. Did a handful of projects over the course of 18 months for a few local small businesses.

You're young. You just graduated. I assume you do not have a mortgage or family to support at this time. Maybe some student loans and a car payment? Big deal. If you have the stomach for it, stick it out. It'll be a rough few years but you'll have enough experience under your belt to be on the ground-floor of the next major wave.

Everything slows down. Almost every CFO wants to be more cautious.

Some companies get more aggressive, since they want to seize the opportunity in the marketplace and possibly get talent for cheap. This typically has pros and cons for the employee.

However, during recessions is historically when the actually cool stuff is built. Find companies doing real things that generate cash flows and try to target them as best you can. Read their blogs, talk to their SWEs on social, build a mini-version of what they do if you. This isn’t just a time waste, suck-up effort, it actually helps you learn the sector of the industry you are interested in. Someone will think it is impressive.

NOTE: hacker news suggestions that “this will only impact those bottom 90% plebe developers” are bad and even if true would only be helpful advice for the top 10% (who typically aren’t on hacker news anyway)