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
What would a recession mean for developers?
11–20 of 143 posts
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made…
Part of the problem is perhaps that you were looking for titles explicitly coded 'junior' at all. Title inflation basically means that many devs that would basically be juniors in real engineering companies are considered senior. It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.
I had 1.5 years of experience (in China). I hustled hard in SF, got rejected by 100+ companies, and really, really struggled to scrape by on some set price contract gigs.
All of that changed one night when I showed a demo of a browser game I'd made at a meetup some Groupon devs happened to be at. That lead to a phone screen, an onsite, a job and then never another time when I couldn't get a decent tech job. Of course my skills improved over time, but the biggest delta was just getting a single name on my resume that hiring recruiters respected.
I sometimes wonder how many people are out there are like me a decade ago—able to do well in whiteboard interviews, capable enough to contribute, eager... and consistently denied a chance to even try.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#13The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.
I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made…
I got a job at a FAANG by writing a for loop to check if a number was prime right around that time. The solution was completely naive and the interview was done over the phone in less than an hour. This is an anecdote, but there were some opportunities like this.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#14[deleted]
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#15The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.
I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made…
I lucked into my first job with a startup and never had to go through the job hunt as a junior candidate (other than through a few big company mass grad hire processes which were an absolute fucking joke, and thank god I didn't actually pass any of them), but this mirrors my experience with hiring juniors.
Every time I've done it I've been inundated with candidates. You pretty much have the pick of the litter.
Personally I'd prefer to hire a lot more juniors. I think most senior front-end developers are pretty rubbish at their jobs and have spent most of an easy career on autopilot learning bad habits and bad development practices. I much prefer to work with juniors, before those "senior" (mostly enterprise and consulting) devs have got to them.
The problem is it's just not possible to train juniors the right way fast enough. I'm confident I can train almost anyone with basic programming aptitude to be a 95th percentile front-end dev, but it'll take a year or two, and my already average productivity will tank during it.
Most managers won't understand or accept that. They would, except that there's always someone else selling them the "get people productive in 2 weeks!" bullshit, which you can't compete with. Big companies (the ones with the budget to train juniors) pay a huge amount of lip service to training, but are pretty much universally bad places to actually train great devs. They're good at turning them into average consultants that get flustered with their tools and stuck all the time, because they overengineer everything and never bothered to learn from first principles. (Then they give up and pretend to work while spending 8 hours a day whinging on HN about how bad the JS ecosystem is).
And if you're doing your own thing without managers to mess it up, then you probably live and die by your productivity. Unless someone wants to throw a stack of money at you just to create great devs without accomplishing much else, then it's not gonna happen naturally.
There's other impediments too. I love working in person with juniors, but not as much as I hate commuting. And I think training juniors is one of the few things that's much harder to do remotely.
This is why there's so much demand for great devs. There's just so few of them. The industry isn't set up to train juniors, and the places that can waste the resources to do it are the ones that have environments which turn them into idiots.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless it’s a “junior” developer with 5 years of experience willing to “wear multiple hats” and “go the extra mile to deliver requirements.”
I mean if that's what you gotta to do get your foot in the door, that's what you gotta do. My first job out of college in the late 90s took 3 months to find. I already had an internship where I did development for money and networking and workstation support. For the first job, I built the applications, designed the database, setup all the servers and all the workstations. I even crimped network cables and managed a…
"if you bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, people will notice and eventually, good things will happen"
In most industries, most of the time hard work no longer pays off. It is not rewarded, it is exploited. The people who would notice are increasingly sociopathic and short-highted, because that's how you make it these days.
Hard work can still open doors, but you have to be smart about who you work for.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#17I'm someone who qualifies as a junior developer even though I have a minor in CS, a BS in math, and a BS in mechanical engineering.
My career has been an interesting journey. I've worked in sales, taught high school mathematic and computer science, and led technical SEO for multiple successful startups.
I left all that in January to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time frontend developer. My wife and I have two daughters and this is my opportunity to show them some risks are worth taking.
I'm not fooling myself into thinking my first developer job is going to fall into my lap, but I'm confident it's out there and I'm going to keep writing code and challenging myself all day, every day until I find it.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made…
I got a job at a FAANG by writing a for loop to check if a number was prime right around that time. The solution was completely naive and the interview was done over the phone in less than an hour. This is an anecdote, but there were some opportunities like this.
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.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a job at a FAANG by writing a for loop to check if a number was prime right around that time. The solution was completely naive and the interview was done over the phone in less than an hour. This is an anecdote, but there were some opportunities like this.
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.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#20It means: „Find a big disfunctional corpo and hire there for a year or two, before you dump that job for something better.”
Just got hired to one for a fat paycheck, ppl skill is way below the market average yet noone seems to care or even notice.