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What would a recession mean for developers?

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Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#51

Post by dspillett »

I'm not the normal case (dropped away from uni due to personal issues, lucked out getting better work than some of my compatriots graduated into 18 months later) and I've been in work for two decades & change (working on the same family if products, though I've been in several companies due to buyouts and such over the years), so I can't speak for the junior looking for work.

One bit of advice I might suggest though is to consider the industry you end up working in: for instance those of us in companies targeting regulated industries tend to weather financial storms a bit better than others because the need to follow regulations doesn't fall away in fact if the behaviour of an industry is seen as a cause of a crash (here's looking at you, sub-prime lending) then regulation will increase and non-tech companies will want some way of implementing/monitoring/automating compliance with it.

It might not be sexy work, but it is relatively recession-safe work.

Though as others point out: networking, and just being good at working, and good at adapting to change, are important too. Even in a relatively safe position the cost cutting axe may fall (due to a slump in sales, or post-merger, etc.) and how well you work with the rest of the company or how key your experience & flexibility are seen as being, can be far more important than pure technical skill when it comes to keeping a safe distance from that blade.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#52

Post by dougmwne »

What if, and bear with me here for a minute, the software fields are going to fare the best out of everyone? The value of tech investment is no longer in question like it was in 2000. The world's largest companies are tech companies, and it's now accepted wisdom that software is not a cost, but a rocket ship and the rocket ships have just become reusable (due to the magic of software I might add).

Maybe it's everyone else who should be worrying that their lowly mere human productivity is going to badly suffer in a tightening job market. Just like in 2008 the meatspace employment was hit hard and never recovered, maybe we can expect a doubling down of investment in productivity multipliers and increasingly replacing jobs with software and ML. I mean how can any heartless MBA look at the output of DALL-E 2 and Imagen and not immediately start scheming to fire 90% of their creative staff?

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#53

Post by tymofiy »

rdevsrex wrote: post #36

If you really just need work asap, Upwork is a great place to go. However, I have love/hate relationship with the platform, as getting noticed can be very hard and they take money off the table. But having found permanent employment on there, and also having hired people on there, sorry to be biased, but if you sound like a native speaker and can hold your own in a Zoom meeting, that's half the yardstick met for me w…

There is https://elsaspeak.com/ - AI-powered coaching app. It helped me a lot.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#54

Post by posed »

exdsq wrote: post #44
advael wrote: post #8

The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…

Some startups are still requiring weird whiteboard questions sadly. Interviewed for a role recently and was asked to navigate a maze of obstacles and teleports with possible infinite loops, saying the minimum number of steps to leave the maze if it’s possible. That was for a test engineering role so… WTF.

Simple BFS from the starting position should do the trick.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#55

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #19
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you just out of school or at the beginning of your career? I've never heard of anything remotely like that but there does seem to be a very different set of expectations for 22 year-olds than for 32 or 42 year-olds with a similar set of skills and amount of experience in the industry.

Yea I was in school at the time.

Were you studying at an "approved" school? Back then that was a big thing for some of the FAANGs.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#56

Post by BlargMcLarg »

pharmakom wrote: post #46
devwastaken wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ive said for over a year now - CS grads cant get hired. Companies are not knocking on their door. Unis have to go out of their way to get companies to even associate. What you hear of big hiring is select schools in select places. Corps want experienced devs, they do not want to create experienced devs. They get away with this because there's no standards like any other field of engineering. We don't band together…

My 4 year degree had some hard theoretical CS content. Yes I could have learned it all on YouTube or whatever, but I did the assignments and the exams so I have proven I could learn the stuff - of course it’s all pretty rusty now. I see a quality degree as a great signal when hiring, and I don’t just mean a few elite schools. If evaluating a degree from somewhere I haven’t heard of, I will poke around the course webs…

I don't think my degrees are worthless either, as at the very least they exposed me to certain types of content. However, my experiences (non-SV) have been that even if these degrees show one can pick up difficult things fast, hiring managers basically wave it off. They are looking for individuals who can effectively step into most of their (absurdly bloated) tech stack by tomorrow.

Maybe it's another story in SV/US, but capacity to learn seems to be about as useful to hiring managers as knowing how to bake eggs.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#57

Post by lordnacho »

skhm wrote: post #50
lordnacho wrote: post #25

Don't spend your time getting better at your job. I'm not saying you don't need to be good, I'm saying the time is better spent doing something else. That other thing is networking. Connect with recruiters on LinkedIn and hit them up for referrals to jobs. I have a quite long list of recruiters in the quant trading niche who contact me from time to time. When they ping me I find out who is hiring and what they're aft…

I also have a tranche of quant folk on LinkedIn but I always assumed they were either selling snake oil or if the roles really were that lucrative, there’d be a work-life balance clash. But it’s not my field, so this is more a gut feeling.

Why would it be snake oil? They don't take any cash from the employee.

As for balance it depends a heck of a lot on the particular shop you're joining.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#58

Post by bitwize »

advael wrote: post #8

The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…

"Brush up on CS fundamentals" means "grind leetcode" which is already table stakes for getting a job, and about to become more important. In a recession, companies will crack down on candidates with interpersonal skills and confidence but no competence.

Interpersonal skills and confidence are deciding factors after you've filtered out the candidates with low technical skill, as determined by leetcode, whiteboard, online coding exercises, etc.

Once again, I've seen enough candidates talk the talk, and then get caught typing in answers verbatim from Google or SO, to know that eliminating coding exercises in the interview process is folly -- it's opening the door for bad hires who can't code and who waste everyone's time.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#59

Post by onion2k »

pharmakom wrote: post #48
onion2k wrote: post #11

It might be harder to find a job, but it doesn't significantly impact whether or not you should start a business. pg wrote an essay on starting up in a downturn: http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

PG has an agenda on this one. Doing a start-up, the job market and my skills are my security. If the work gets scarce the risk profile of doing a start-up gets worse.

If you're looking for security you shouldn't be doing a startup in the first place. It's pretty much the riskiest move you can make as far as your career goes.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#60

Post by usrbinbash »

advael wrote: post #8

The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…

> There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteboard coding"

Good.

Whiteboard coding is probably one of the least useful methods I have ever seen to evaluate candidates. It tells me nothing about the persons actual qualification and can be gamed.

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