271–280 of 419 posts
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Scania, the truck manufacturer, did this during 08-09. 10% paycut, 20% time reduction and they encouraged people to use the time to study and improve. None were laid off.
Much of this is not due to goodwill of owners, but unions.
I was a software engineer through that time period, and for me it was a non event. If you’re working at a profitable business and not some negative billion dollar growth company, you’ll be fine. Software engineers are going to be in demand for a while yet.
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I’m from Boise, where HP headquarters are. Many of my friends parents were laid off unceremoniously in 2008/9. There was a lot of resentment
HP was a different company by 2008. The HP Way had been replaced by the usual corporate abuse - good for the share price, bad for everyone else.
I finally took a job with a company whose flagship product was a browser front end over a 30 year old Pick database. They hired almost anyone off the street and gave them a two week training course before turning them loose in client code (customizations to the flagship application). They were literally training new hires to program, and I was kind of at a disadvantage because I knew what I was doing and got things done quickly, which is a liability when you bill by the hour.
The twenty year old company re-branded to a dot com and was planning an IPO. We got new business cards and letterhead with the new name and everything. Then the owners saw the writing on the wall. They silently dropped their IPO plans and we got new business cards with the same new name except no ".com" at the end.
With only an associate's degree and with my only professional experience being an outdated database system + programming language, all recruiters wanted to talk to me about was roles with this same outdated system that was apparently running in places all over the world. If I wanted to hitch my wagon to a dying platform, I had a place in France begging for someone like me to one work on site for a couple months.
Even those calls stopped when the bubble burst. I took another job on that outdated platform that paid better and kept sending out resumes. Things eventually got better, but I still couldn't find a role outside Pick systems.
It wasn't until I spent my own cash on a Java certification AND the market improved that I started getting calls again. But then I faced a different challenge, because my Java experience was the wrong KIND. I had worked with Oracle Application Server and their suite, not Websphere or Weblogic. I understand now that a lot of that strict filtering was to prove that nobody local had the skills that offshore developers had. Yep, the early 2000s was all about offshoring!
It's my opinion that starting my career in that time and place set my career back at least five years. That experience is irrelevant now, thankfully, and I'm in a pretty good spot these days managing a devops team.
I don't want to be all "you kids don't know how easy you have it", but it's so easy today to spin up a web application, host it for practically free, and maybe make a business out of it. I would have to fax over code samples, and now you have recruiters and hiring managers cruising GitHub profiles looking for coders to reach out to.
I do worry about the possibility of another bubble. I'd probably be fine, even if I had to do something outside tech for a while. But for young folks outside SV things could get pretty hairy again.
This is how the first dot-com ended for me, including a few jobs prior, because I feel the setup is important. I out of college I started a company with some friends from high-school, worked that for 6 months, but wasn't making any money, so I got a job at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. I worked there for over a year, but hated suburbia (back then Seattle didn't have many people who lived downtown, and pre-restaurant scen…
I'd say, I don't think a recession will be so bad for the engineers this time around. Afterall, there's a ton of outsourcing to other countries that happens these days, and a lot of companies seem to have thin engineering teams in the states. I know there's big-tech where this isn't necessarily the case, but I already think that companies and their engineering budgets are much more modest compared to the old days. Also, with the few exceptions for those crushing it on stock options in big tech, I think salaries are a lot lower over all in software engineering, even 18 years later.
I was working at Microsoft at the time. All the smart cool people left to go do startups, money was easy to get. This was 5 years in to my first job. I encouraged my friends not to sell their Microsoft stock because it was going up for a long time still (some are even still my friends). The market crashed but Microsoft kept on going. I didn't really notice a change. Many of my friends came back to the mother ship. I…
I went through it, and started a company soon after it crashed and then a couple more during the downturn. Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it. What I saw and experienced was enterprise devs basically just kept doing what they did. Startup devs that could went into (or back in some cases) to enterprises. Enterprises used it as an opportunity to snag up g…
> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. I did fine in 2009 when I was laid off, getting a job in a month, but hiring can be random and I knew some great people that struggled to find their next role. Some developed issues as a result that raised the bar yet higher. People are crazy and irrational so never take these things personally. Deliver good…
I went through it, and started a company soon after it crashed and then a couple more during the downturn. Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it. What I saw and experienced was enterprise devs basically just kept doing what they did. Startup devs that could went into (or back in some cases) to enterprises. Enterprises used it as an opportunity to snag up g…
> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. My anecdote is the opposite: My father was an engineer at a company that made machines for semiconductor manufacturing. They had a physical product, customers liked them, they sold each machine at a profit - none of the obvious-with-hindsight folly of companies like Pets.com. However, when the dot-com bust h…
Last time much of the entire market and product was new, e.g. web purchasing was barely in its infancy, companies were building up around that and the web wasn't an integral part of peoples lives, yet. Today, everything we do is around smart devices, the internet etc, so I don't think a collapse like we saw during the dot com boom/bust is likely. But that's just my opinion, could be totally wrong.
I went through it, and started a company soon after it crashed and then a couple more during the downturn. Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it. What I saw and experienced was enterprise devs basically just kept doing what they did. Startup devs that could went into (or back in some cases) to enterprises. Enterprises used it as an opportunity to snag up g…
> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. That was my experience as well, all the weird roles got cut in companies, all the crazy extras removed, but the companies that had working business models kept on trucking and hiring competent developers, and competent developers at unsustainable businesses had no trouble finding new work. Because at the end…
So I'd only caution people to pay close attention the whole time so you can know when to jump back into the market and to capitalize on that next salary increase.
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>the boss/owner should be paid last Yup. My dad is big on that too. Always thought he overplayed it, but one day he explained that the people he employs are quite poor. So if they don't get paid they can't put food on the table - literally. While he has a bit more of a buffer.
Leaders Eat Last. A very good book by Simon Sinek but based on an old Marine Corps principal. While other services have 'head of line privileges' - basically the more senior you are the more you can cut in line to get food at chow time. In the Marines, you always line up most junior to more senior. It drives home the responsibility leaders have to take care of the people who follow them.