281–290 of 419 posts
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>Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it. Can you expand on this? I'm honestly curious about what machinations begin once a company dies or the market sinks.
Start a new company. Lots of talent available and investors look for heads-down new things. Classic Namazu stuff.
I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully. He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recess…
I have a good friend who has helmed several very successful software companies. His philosophy is quite different: it is unfair to ask employees to work take a pay cut (and work more hours) when they could find another job that would potentially pay them more money.
I'm not posting this to argue with the HP philosophy, but rather to point out that there are other ways for management to care about their employees.
For the record, I stuck with my current employer through some hard times (forced furlough was the worst of it) because I appreciated what the leadership was doing, and believed in the goals of the organization.
My view has always been that during the dot com boom, companies were so short staffed that they would basically take anyone on, regardless of their technical skill, with the hopes of training them up to learn programming. Janitor, receptionist, your weird cousin Eddie who ate glue - all of them could get a tech job if they really wanted one.
When the bubble burst, lots of people lost jobs. Both skilled people and unskilled. This was a huge darwin moment for people who'd worked at startups. Lots of people went back to whatever they were doing pre-bubble. The better people typically found work, even if it took a little while to do so.
In my view, it really did serve as a healthy shake-out of talent in the long run. This very well may happen again soon...
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Much of this is not due to goodwill of owners, but unions.
A pay cut would be an "over my dead body" issue for many unions. Edit: Since this apparently does not go without saying, the feedback loops in a union are all wrong for taking that kind of risk (remember, the pay cut does not guarantee company survival). People willing to rock the boat with calculated gambles like that do not rise to positions of authority in a union.
Of course unions/employee representatives have a different place here(e.g. half of members of the board of directors are elected representatives of employees.)
In bad times, the correlation of bad things rises a lot, just like so many fund managers have discovered the hard way. In 2001, seeing what was coming, I left a Linux distro startup and went back to a previous and seemingly secure IT job. I even had plans to take aircraft lessons... Then, the owner sold the company. The buyers were actually "locusts" - people that offer to buy struggling businesses just to hollow out…
then I recognized the nickname :)
As someone who started his engineering career after the burst, is good to hear the experiences (good ones and bad ones) before the next one burst.
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9/11 was well after the dot-com crash. It didn't help, though.
the crash was not a singular event, 9/11 was at the tail end of it but it was crashing for a good 2 years or so from 2000-2002/3 (look at a graph of the NASDAQ from the 90s till today).
It hit me hard, and there were so many people looking for programming jobs that I found it impossible to find a new job. I didn't handle things very well, and ended up doing jobs like washing-up and putting up marquees.
The story ends happily though, I found a good software job fairly soon, and those other jobs I did in between gave me a bit of experience of life, a bit of perspective.