Ask HN: How are you, a dev/programmer, preparing for the probable recession?

I honestly don't know. Investing in anything seems futile since everything keeps crashing. I'm just living more conservatively and focusing on maximizing my cash pile.

If inflation does start hitting double digits, I wouldn't know what to do.

The family just started a three month period of what I've been calling 'Austerity' to tighten the belt a little bit and reign in our pretty careless spending lately. Basically it means stop buying various crap and toys off Amazon (by toys I'm including my own ridiculous accumulation of board and video games I'll likely never play, or only play once in a blue moon), cooking more, going out to eat less. It's been going...okay, we could certainly be doing better though.

Financially we do have some emergency cash in the bank, and if we had to we could liquidate some assets (although I'd rather not if at all possible, especially considering how much they've taken a beating in value this year).

I'm not sure what I'll do about my job. I'm relatively well established there, but I haven't really been making myself too visible to the rest of the company outside my immediate team lately (the team only has six people in it at the moment) so that might not be great in case layoffs end up happening, although the project we're on is a pretty strategic one for a large client and letting me improve several skills, and I've also been showing I can manage the company's offshore developers, so I'm hoping that's enough that I don't get caught up in a layoff anytime soon.

I have been tempted to possibly make another job hop before the recession and hopefully get established there before the recession kicks into full gear and I end up being kind of stuck where I'm at for a while, though, but that runs the risk of being included in a layoff much more easily as well.

Honestly if I do get laid off I will probably be relieved and take my time getting my next job, have a mini-sabbatical probably. I've been kind of teetering on the precipice of burnout land for a while now, and have been really wanting more energy to work on some pet projects, get some video games finished and put out in the world, without ever having enough energy leftover in the week to put much of a dent in those projects. I am chipping away at a game library that should help speed up that development if and when that ever happens.

I can't justify taking such a sabbatical otherwise, though, as really my wife needs it even more than I do, as she's struggling to juggle her full time job and working an extra 20-40 hours a week getting a side business going (the austerity is in part to help pad our savings to allow her shift to part-time for her day job at some point next year).

A quote from a book I like:

Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary.

[US specific] I am of the thought process (and I could be wrong) that we'll have a normal recession or maybe a bit worse and then the US economy will do what it has for the past 100 years and eventually return to normal. I think that the kind of people that post on online forums (like this thread and places like /r/leanfire) can be economic doomers and expect things to fall apart completely at any second.

Decrease spending, increase saving. Lower expenses means your savings goes even further. Once you do that, keep it that way even in times of prosperity. You'll probably be able to weather economic downturns. Even if the US economy were to never prosper as it has, knowing how to live on less is huge to a safe financial future.

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