Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession

Currently working in a company that's short staffed but there's a seemingly endless amount of work.

Things might be so charitable in many companies out there for all I care, but that's definitely not the situation everywhere.

Then again, at least in my current company things are nowhere near as bad as 996, but please don't ignore such problems either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

One might also bring up the fact that people in "outsourcing" countries also don't have such nice WLB.

> Not willing to study afterwork to improve their career,

Most of the stuff i've learnt (Docker/OCI, Swarm/Kubernetes/Nomad, CI/CD concepts, monitoring, different architectures and new languages) all were in my free time, because the tech stacks at work were somewhat dated and would pigeonhole me into maintenance roles and similar enterprise messes.

Then again, one can and should make the point: doctors don't practice their craft over the weekends, why should software engineers? Do cashiers have to do unpaid work after hours? Do teachers? And if yes, is that okay? Shouldn't your work be compensated, instead of cutting into your free time?

> Not willing to work on legacy products where we pay them 40% more.

Currently the oldest project that I'm working on is like 8 years old and it's a mess. Recently tried modernizing it, would recommend that NOBODY ever try to do that, since I learnt almost no new skills at the expense of massive amounts of stress and struggling with problem after problem, just to keep this old monolith alive.

40% might seem nice at a glance, but what about the alternative costs of not learning new and relevant technologies and thus getting passed up for new work opportunities? What about suffering daily due to needing to waste your time with some dated mess, since most old code is unwieldy to work with at best and horrible at worst?

> In the first 2 years, I can pay someone 35 -> 50 -> +10k bonus, and they’ll leave for a job at 65 going 75 with a tech stack that ticks all boxes.

That is largely how the industry is and I doubt that I can blame people for wanting to maximize their own earning potential, especially in the current financial climate.

Of course, once again this doesn't really match up with my own circumstances, given that owning a home might take about 10 more years of saving money for me, given that I'm not as well paid as all these other developers.

> You can teach them React + SpringBoot + Kubernetes, and they’ll still leave because company XYZ does AWS + Neo4j + AI… while still not fixing spelling mistakes in the UI and still in the habit of downloading and entire DB tables and filter them in the Java side, and seeing no problem asking for a microservices architecture.

With this, I can mostly agree. If things like spelling don't matter to people, obviously they aren't going to pay attention to them.

But overall, I still find your points to be too focused on a particular environment. Developers everywhere doesn't have it quite as good to begin with, no matter how much of an echo chamber HN can sometimes be.

Then again, last i checked, a Google employee would bring in around ~20x more profits for their company than I would (with some oversimplified back-of-the-napkin maths): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

1. Bootstrapped business are very good at cash management because they usually don't have a lot of cash.

2. Better to never be hired than hired for three weeks and laid off.

3. Software development is still an awesome industry to be in and there are still far too few developers than there are jobs at all levels.

4. Look for companies that have customers that continue to buy in a downturn if you fear recession. Companies that serve government, healthcare and energy industries tend to be safe, but they usually pay less than other industries.

Counterpoint: if you want to stay relevant in technology and be above regular level, you gotta have the passion for it and that implies doing your homework.

Look at it from another perspective. If you want to play a guitar in a band for money, you don’t require the band to give you “time to learn”. You learn on your own time.

If you don’t want to learn, you become irrelevant and get replaced.