I am no economist but it is esp concerning to me that with particular recession due to inflation there don't seem to be any "easy" option like Quantitative Easing available to get out of it fast so I fear that this might a painful one which is adding to my anxiety. How worried are you and what are you doing to handle it? Is there a chance it could be as bad as 2008 or worse 2000? (I was not in the professional job market during those years so I have no idea how bad they were other than knowing they were real bad).
I'm tired of the world insisting that every company must be growing in order to be valuable, and then when growth stagnates, people ditch it to cause massive losses.
Can we not just have moderate success? Can we create a system that doesn't self implode every so often? Can we create a system where making money at all costs (including the decimation of the planet, the wage-slave workforce, and the engorging and toppling of governments through cronyism) isn't the the default?
I have to remember that people are _generally_ good. I have faith in the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and doers. What will happen will happen, but I have hope that the youth who have seen wave after wave of "being at the brink" might be able to create a system where this isn't the norm.
That's a ramble, sorry. But it's just what I'm feeling. I have to ride this wave, take care of my partner and children, do what I can for others, and hope it ends soon.
Step outside of the news and step outside of cutting-edge tech companies and moderate success is basically the norm. There are many companies out there that are chugging along, doing okay but not really shooting for the moon. They're not making headlines or coming across your social media feeds as the hottest companies around, though, so you're not going to see them unless you go looking.
The catch, of course, is that the average moderately successful company pays a lot less than the average high-growth startup company. You might find that you're less pressured, of course, so it's not exactly unfair. However, many of us are drawn to high-paying companies, and high-paying companies generally correlate strongly with high-growth expectations.
The vast majority of tech companies are ones you’ve probably never heard of. They don’t pay spectacularly like the SV shops but they don’t underpay either.
I currently work for an digital agency in Ohio. You probably have never heard of them and you likely never will. They don’t make headlines but they’ve chugged along for over a decade, making a healthy business out of building applications for local companies in Ohio as well as some larger companies you have definitely heard of.
Companies like these are the majority, but you never hear about them because the media is focused on a few select companies, mostly consumer tech, that everyone’s heard of and generate headlines.
Sure, but Hacker News is a strange place to lament about that.
The country is full of exactly what you're looking for. Go work in an IT department in a medium size business, or a non-profit. Join a consulting group that does software development outside a major metropolitan area. Join a software company that's been around for 20-30 years running the same product. Join the software development team at a company who focuses on the development of their internal proprietary applications.
(I'm not insulting these place. I spent half my career at them. There's nothing wrong with them. They're just different. And they tend not to have the focus on growth.)
There's a lot of companies doing exactly what you want. They just don't make the headlines. And they're definitely not talked about on Hacker News. It's a bit like vegetarian showing up at a steakhouse & acting surprised.
In today's world of corporate growth via acquisition, having a modestly successful job with a modestly successful mid-sized company in no way insulates you from the economic forces of the outside world.
Legitimate modest success tends to result either in a series of endless acquisitions where a mid-size business gets absorbed into incrementally larger businesses time after time - or where the business gets acquired by one of the larger, monolithic players in the industry. With any acquisition, restructurings, layoffs and product changes have substantial impact on those moderately successful staffers.
Alternately, stagnation or modest decline typically results in vulnerability to market forces which results again in a buyout by another player in the market, or a buyout by a private equity group who cuts costs, lays off staff, and tries to leverage whatever assets they can to maximize their return at the expense of the business itself. The effects on the staffers are even worse.
Sure, you can find a boring, moderately successful job for yourself. It may last 5, even 10 years. But the days of being able to have a modestly successful, boring job with the same company for 30 years appear to be completely gone.
It being so "obvious", perhaps you could clearly state the problem. And then you might possibly also have a solution (as do so many commentators today)?
If you've studied complex social systems (e.g., the USA's socio-political environment) nothing is "obvious" about them and most "solutions" prove to be illusory.
-"Life is a bitch and then you die."
I certainly don’t lose sleep over what happens in Australia for example.
People came up with the idea of good, being good is essentially acting in consensus with society therefore it is unsurprising that most people are good.
There are people who are genuinely good and almost without fail, they are people who have devoted their lives to helping others. Often they fly under the radar and aren't very well off. They don't make the news but you know one when you meet them and they have a huge impact on those around them.
There are also bad people, if you'll forgive the Marvel level depth of that proclamation. There are people who make the world worse, usually for their own benefit or entertainment.
Generally I think 95+% of people are neutral - just minding their own business. Is that virtuous, or just the minimum?
Maybe the idea of “goodness” is a layer on top of that, created by consciousness, but it’s not a completely invented thing by society just to make people conform.
But we have it much easier than previous generations. We've got better health, wonderful technology, more information than ever before. There's less poverty and less disease. Less racism. More empathy.
Consider the folks who were around for WWI. It was followed by a flu outbreak, huge stock market crash, Great Depression, then WWWII and Korean conflict.
Life is hard. But we don't have it so bad.
Life is relative. It's not an argument to say "yea but we're better than the Ancient Egyptians!" So what? That isn't meaningful.
Using World War 1 really tells. That was a century ago. No one is even alive from then anymore.
That doesn't mean that there aren't parties that are responsible for much of our current troubles - be it the state of the education/healthcare systems, the state of the housing market, the state of salaries/wages, environmental issues, human rights, as well as the ever growing trend of identity politics and a variety of other issues.
It is also not infeasible that these problems might have actionable solutions and that change for the better would actually be possible with lots of effort. Ergo, accepting things as they are because "it could be worse" isn't a valid stance that would motivate one for whatever actions are necessary to improve the world in whatever capacity possible - be it protests, exercising your rights to vote, or calling out problematic behavior.
The system works. (Maybe not as fast as we like sometimes, but it absolutely works.)
More like once in a decade, and recent ones are substantially smaller than in previous centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Recessions aren’t once in a lifetime?
> I'm tired of the world insisting that every company must be growing in order to be valuable
They don’t. It’s just the growth companies don’t pay dividends
> and then when growth stagnates, people ditch it to cause massive losses.
Because it’s price is speculation on future profits which would create future dividends
> Can we not just have moderate success?
Yeah
> Can we create a system that doesn't self implode every so often?
Not really, but we can make the implosions less severe
> Can we create a system where making money at all costs (including the decimation of the planet, the wage-slave workforce, and the engorging and toppling of governments through cronyism) isn't the the default?
No
> I have to remember that people are _generally_ good. I have faith in the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and doers. What will happen will happen, but I have hope that the youth who have seen wave after wave of "being at the brink" might be able to create a system where this isn't the norm.
Seems dubious to me. We will do better on some select issues but mostly otherwise the same
Depends on where you are. Parts of Latin America have been in an economic pit since the late 70s - I guess you could say “once in a lifetime” - for some people, their entire lifetimes have been spent in a state of economic crisis.
I remember the talk about "stagflation" in the 1970s, though I was too young to really understand it. The boom economy that started in the 1980s crashed in 2000. I remember that well as I lost my job. In 2008 I was working in the public sector and my employment was unaffected, I also didn't have any mortgages with stupid terms, and didn't need any of my retirement investments yet so I just rode that one out. So a recession in 2022, especially given the past two years, is maybe a bit early but not really surprising.
Meanwhile, what the U.S. should be doing is ruthlessly cracking down on de facto monopolies and oligopolies that are ripping off Americans and making record profits, like meat... baby formula... and most of all TicketMaster.
Oligarchies offer a way to buffer this effect, so that there can be several companies existing in an industry that slow-walk (disruptive) innovation and buy up competitors in their early stages. Hard to say how long an oligarchy can hold, though. Look at Intel & AMD, and how they're facing a serious test from ARM chips. Even further, what will the onset of Quantum Computing do to the market holds they have.
Free enterprise's nature as winner-take-all is what makes the difference here. Why was it that Friendster, Myspace, and Second Life could all co-exist, but when FaceBook came along they went defunct (mostly). In a more extreme example, consider robotics/AI and how it will replace humans. When robotic surgery is perfected, will 'manual' surgery even be considered 'safe' anymore?
All that would mean is a replacement of the world order and an even further degradation of quality of life.
Does not seem reasonable, tbh...
generally means they are average which means half of the people are even worse!
You still have a family unit, that's not too individualistic but also not too tribal. You have technological and military progression, and a fairly comfortable stable economy. You don't have to worry about billions of dollars in corruption or an aggressive president using nuclear weapons in negotiations. Nor are there the wars and tensions of the middle east or eastern Europe.
The world is getting "smaller". An ever smaller group of people can create bigger chaos than they could in the past, be it hacking, 3D printed WMD's, or Tweeting hate. We have entered the Century of Trolls.
You’ve been misled. While the exact details may be once in a lifetime, expect world shaking events every 10ish or less years.
Are you now, or have you ever been... poor?
There has been unprecedented money printing in tough times that doesn't revert to mean before the next economic crisis comes along. This results in huge misallocation of resources and a lot of long term negative consequences all to avoid short term pain.
At some point the developed governments on Earth will have their hand forced rather than playing god with the economic cycle.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/indiana-jones-collapsed-...
1) Things are about to get incredibly nasty over the next 3-6 months.
2) Things only stay bad until the Fed capitulates and decides to start rescuing things. In this case we will be choosing inflation over a recession. And I'm saying inflation as a long term trend, at least 5 years.
But basically the game is up. This all ends up in one of two ways
1) The fed defaults on the debt and tells the Boomers they were just joking about Social Security and Medicaid existing as interest expenses drastically increase while tax receipts drastically decrease from a baseline of 127% debt to GDP (this will NEVER happen. You don't default on your debt as the world's reserve currency. Why would you? This is the one thing the MMT crowd gets right)
2) We give up and take our inflation medicine to cure our sovereign debt issues.
It's going to be option 2 11 out of 10 times. History is pretty clear on this point.
To me, no one lays this case out better than Luke Gromen:
I think very likely the future doesn't have one reserve currency, that the USD still plays something similar to its current role but similar transactions also happen in more currencies. so we lose sole reserve currency status, but not reserve currency status. The truth is we are already past this point. A lot of oil is already being traded outside of the dollar system already which wasn't true even 10 years ago.
There are 100s of hours of people including Gromen discussing this topic in depth on youtube if you look around.
It's more accurate to say: you don't default on your debt when your debt is denominated in your own currency. It doesn't require any specific reserve currency status to play that game.
There is the Euro, but it's not like there aren't several EU countries with severe financial issues. COVID hit the Eurozone pretty hard, and with high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the prospect of very high food and energy prices the next six months I wouldn't be too sure. Interest rates are finally going up aswell. EURIBOR just went above 0% for the first time in many years and there's a lot of people in overvalued homes currently fearing the bubble will burst.
I guess I could worry, but having been through enough of these "sky is falling" events I've mostly decided to just tune out. I think it was covid, or more specifically the wildfires during covid, that finally just broke me down into a "i no longer give a fuck" mindset.
Bad shit happens. I'll continue to be kind to others, and try to treat people the way I would want to be treated. Life will do what life is going to do.
Edit to add: regarding the recession, talk to your supervisors and others in your company. Are layoffs actually likely? What is the outlook? You should only worry if your company specifically is in trouble. Even then, we are in a highly in-demand field, there is a good chance you'll find a new job if you focus on doing excellent work here and now (be so-good-they-can't-ignore-you, as it were).
But at some point it is worth acknowledging that prolonged anguish or anxiety about something bad isn't useful unless it leads to action (see sphere of influence). We can't stop all bad things from happening and they are happening continuously to people around the world -- we can't let that get in the way of improving the lives of ourselves and the people around us.
Worst of all, you can't do anything about either of those
It may not be the right approach, but if you are suffering because of everyone else you should reconsider your priorities
It doesn’t mean they’re not important, it’s just that it’s ok to take a break.
Sometimes people need that break from the eternal flow of news and social media so that their mental health isn’t impacted and so there is time to process what’s going on.
I'm perhaps one of the odd HN users. I'm religious and don't really have too much attachment to material wealth.
I make decent money right now but there has been times in my life when I have been poor. I was born in a third world country and know what it's like to survive on little (it sucks but not as much as you think).
If I lose my entire fortune and life savings tomorrow, I'll be fine. I'll flip burgers, deliver pizza or wash cars if I have to (though I doubt the west will have such a massive crash, but who knows?).
My happiness doesn't derive from my comfortable clothes; it comes from being with my loved ones, especially my fiance.
I go to Mass regularly and volunteer at Church with her often. One thing that's been very important for us spiritually is willing the good of others (this is what love means in a Christian sense) and when you do this often enough, you stop putting so much emphasis on your salary, your iPhones and Macbooks.
I'm not saying this to come off as "morally superior" , au contraire, it's to simply share my experience; If it comes off that way, I apologize.
Finally, allow me to leave you with one of my favorite poems by Charles Bukowski.
"don't forget
there is always somebody or something
waiting for you,
something stronger, more intelligent,
more evil, more kind, more durable,
something bigger, something better,
something worse, something with
eyes like the tiger, jaws like the shark,
something crazier than crazy,
saner than sane,
there is always something or somebody
waiting for you
as you put on your shoes
or as you sleep
or as you empty a garbage can
or pet your cat
or brush your teeth
or celebrate a holiday
there is always somebody or something
waiting for you.
keep this fully in mind
so that when it happens
you will be as ready as possible.
meanwhile, a good day to
you
if you are still there.
I think that I am---
I just burnt my fingers on
this
cigarette."
I only have a limited understanding of economics, but I have a feeling that you may be misunderstanding dynamics at play during a recession. If I get it right people would stop spending money for non-essential things, so no more burgers, pizza delivery, car washing, spending on hobby’s, holidays, etc. Jobs with lower wages and ones with lower requirements are likely to be the most impacted. Add to this that more people are desperate looking for anything to get some form of income, you’re now competing with way more people for your burger flipping position.
Doesn’t sound like a great plan. But again, I may be completely incorrect here.
Savings rate is decreasing not increasing.
I lived through recessions since the ‘60s. The 2008 bust almost wiped me out but at least I stayed employed.
I worry about my kids, though.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-do...
We absolutely will not. Economic catastrophe leads to misery and death for many.
The issue of economic boom and bust and the effect on people's lives, at its heart, I believe is a philosophical one. If you view it from the perspective economic libertarianism where government regulation is evil -- boom and bust cycles occur frequently. If you view it from the perspective of social justice and equality where government oversight of business is a necessary evil -- boom and bust cycles occur less frequently.
It's like those signs we saw so much of in the first covid year "we'll all get through this together." Well, a million of us didn't, did they not count as "us?"
I don't know your politics here and I'm not trying to pick an ideological fight. I just wish it was more routine for people to acknowledge the actual human costs of large scale events. Keeping hope alive is necessary, but a recession will kill people, so "at least no one will die" can't be the hope you provide here.
Policy makers (and voters) have kept the zombies alive, pumped assets and introduced exciting new complexity.
This is the big one.
Or maybe it isn’t. No one knows.
Or maybe it is. Maybe someone knows.
Start at part 1 if you have time.
It says, after literally 1 article. What a garbage website.
In my case I followed the link, realized it was a 3 part article so I went to the first part and got the message, said "Well, lets check the third one then" and got the message again.
So objectively it is a garbage website, they were trying to convince me to subscribe by showing me something I was not able to see due to the site design
OTOH, the reckoning has been pending for some time. How long depends upon whom you care to blame.
Let's get it over with, clear the decks of the deadwood leadership that have plagued us, and apply the good distributed sense toward a prosperous next several decades.
Until the cycle of "derpery" repeats.
pretty sure nuclear war can.
and will.
Unemployment is 3.6%.
Nasdaq was overvalued - QQQ went from 100 in 2016 to 400 in 2021. No reason not to return to 150-200.
The only concerning events is that the capital that left the market would never return since it was the baby boomer last big capital injection before they retire en mass and remove thier 401K from stocks.
On the other hand, there is a lot of job openings due to this retirement.
High inflation is actually a good thing, as it is result from wage increases, which means that there are shortages in the job market.
Overall, this looks to me like the wage arbitrage is being removed from the market.
This is quite the take. I very much doubt that high inflation is good, and that it's primarily derived from shortages in the job market.
is it though? At least here in Europe high inflation is mainly caused by rapid increase in energy, logistic and food prices. Wages haven't even started to catch up, which will just cause more inflation in the short & mid-term.
Except wages rarely keep up with inflation. Inflation is for rich people to erode and erase debt - or, more accurately, externalize it on others - nothing more.
(Although one could make a queuing theory argument that a hiring freeze could reduce efficiency of existing engineers if it results in poor division of labor and too much context switching)
The only relatively safe haven in tech during a recession is cloud services as long as the cloud enables companies to reduce head count and cut costs. Otherwise capital expenditure budget cuts would hit clouds as well.
Your argument is that I’m overestimating the value engineers produce because that value depends on them getting paid to do the work?
-When profits started to decline in the 70's, they decided to let manufacturing go overseas and to jack up interest rates in order to suppress wages and fight inflation.
-However, this left a problem where American consumers no longer had enough spending power to buy the products they were making. They dealt with this problem by printing money and using it to finance debt and then exporting the extra dollars overseas. They were able to do this because the US dollar is the world reserve currency and is in demand everywhere.
-However, this created a series of debt bubbles in the united states. Each one was dealt with by printing ever increasing amounts of money, kicking the can down the line until the next recession. Interest rates steadily fell and fell until they hit zero.
-When interest rates hit zero, they had to switch to quantitative easing. This was accompanied by a speculative "everything bubble". But now, with the amount of debt continuing to increase, the value of the US dollar started to slide, manifesting in inflation again.
-The fed will have to raise interest rates a lot to fight the problem. But this will cause a massive deleveraging as debt cannot be rolled over anymore, plus the interest on the federal deficit will be enormous.
-It is politically impossible to raise taxes to deal with the shortfall, so deficits will grow even larger, and to get people to buy the debt, interest rates will have to go up even further.
-This will eventually culminate in a loss of confidence in the US dollar. Prices of imports will skyrocket and the economy will crash. The united states will ultimately have to default on its debt.
-The resulting political instability will likely result in an autocratic government. The formal structures of congress and the senate will continue to exist but actual rule will be by presidential decree.
Fascist governments or Bonaparte-like leaders can only maintain power by promising greatness and a return to traditional values (The traditional values part comes from the fact that some reason must be found for the country's problems, the explanation given tends to be that we have offended god in some way)- this usually results in war.
That's the nightmare scenario.
And that actually is a bit different.
As a result I think the Fed is going to slam on the brakes. They've already started to do that using 0.50 basis point hikes and signalling their intent to get to 2% by September. I still don't think that's enough to tank the economy into a recession, but they're indicating that they're willing to tank the economy very hard in order to create a glut of workers for the available jobs.
It is likely going to be worse than 2008. CMBS should pop at some point creating a financial crisis, and crypto will get stress tested and may entirely collapse (wiping out the "savings" of a lot of Millennials).
What I would be real worried about is that the Republicans are likely to take over congress this year and likely to take over the Presidency in 2024 one way or another. And the social unrest will be jacked up to 11 again and a good chunk of the Republicans are now people whose stated belief is in just letting the system collapse. Unlike 2008 they may sit on the sidelines and watch money market funds collapse, short term lending fail, payrolls fail and ATMs stop working (enough of them may realize this will tank their stock portfolios that they blink though, particularly if the Republicans are the party in power and it would fall on them).
I still continue to think that the economy is not right now in a recession and that the Fed is going to have to jack up funds higher than 2% to cause a recession (they were 2% in 2019 before the pandemic as well), but I think it is clearly coming by 2024.
They'll still panic though and drop the funds rate back down to zero and start doing QE. I don't know if it works yet again. The cycle does seem to be able to continue forever, but at some point we may reach the "pushing on a string" moment where faith in the US economy and dollar starts to evaporate, or where social unrest takes things to a whole new level.
I agree- the fed knows that profit levels are higher with low wages even if it means a recession than if you continue to let workers have all that leverage. But there's only so far that you can continue to cut the pay of workers and make up the lost consumer spending with leverage.
And I should have highlighted more that given the overhang of job openings and secular trends like retirement of baby boomers, that they may not be able to accomplish their goals short of a great depression and substantially tanking the broader economy.
Maybe in a decade or so, property ownership will be within the reach of middle-class families again.
Maybe a small percent will find it advantageous to walk because they're underwater and can fanangle and can financial magic to buy a different house cheaper.
A small percentage might not be able to pay their 2021 payment because of gas prices or job loss.
The biggest risk to prices or banks is likely collateralized commercial investors.
So it´s like living in the Titanic. Everybody knows it´s sinking and the government is just stealing from us (the passengers) in order to buy nicer lifeboats just for them, and paying the musicians (media, labor unions, allied parties...) to keep citizens still and quiet.
We are under an autocracy disguised as a "people´s party" that is bleeding us dry while many families are just drowning because of the high cost of living and unemployment.
Seems like the markets are bad for reasons that are hard to understand, so people are creating stories by combining the other ambient bad things at the moment.
No real point or argument to what I’m saying, just an observation.
The second edition in 2006 warned of a housing market bubble.
The third edition in 2015 warned of a bubble in almost everything.
So I've been concerned since 2015 about the next recession.
It does look increasingly likely to happen in the next 1-2 years.
Damodaran has some interesting analysis on what might happen to different market sectors.
https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/
All the best.
The Fed has no way to fix the current supply chain shortage issue, which is half the equation in the rising inflation, their only tool in the box is aggressive rate hike to dampen demand. Essentially Fed wants demand to go way down, we don't feel the impact yet because the stock market isn't cracked yet. Fed wants it cracked.
that what caused the problem in the first place. and it was only "easy" for the bankers.
banks got away with murder in 2008 and got bailed out. we had over decade of "austerity", social benefits cut, disabled and mentally ill forced to work, zero hour contracts and exploitation. destabilising the middle east causing waves of immigration and societal pressures.
the baby boomers have created a mess, and now their next act the great reset is coming.
My suggestion stays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Crash,_1929
“The lesson of 1929 was that laissez faire economics and political economy concentrates market power and the market downturns don’t always right themselves” (paraphrasing)
There was a ton of stuff put in place after the Great Depression which was then undone through decades of corporate “influence.”
I don’t know that what we’re headed for will be 1929 level bad. I’m not suggesting that. But that’s a great book to start enlightening yourself. The highly complex mortgage backed securities that led to 2007/2008 were never undone. The ARM loans which ballooned and kicked off the fulcrum of defaults and thus collapse from suddenly worthless securities were never addressed. And this time the international situation is far more developed and intertwined.
There absolutely are things that can be done to relieve a lot of this though. Tariffs can be rolled back. That would lower many prices.
My big wish would be corporations to learn to not cut quite so many corners that they become fragile to supply shocks. For people to seek out energy sources without huge social and environmental externalities. For people to choose to buy local first/where possible. For people to be open to growing local production like manufacturing of physical goods. Etc.
Edit-and “buy local” includes hiring local labor. And paying local taxes-corporations benefit from things like road works and other local services.
There's still tons of things to automate, so I don't think there's going to be a lack of jobs, but the easy money won't be around for a while
Working class wages stopped growing at the end of the 1960s in real terms. The income inequality is approaching French Revolution levels. Media of all types is tuned for maximum "engagement" which externalizes it's costs as the destruction of the social fabric.
I'm really worried. I can't change the big picture, all I can do is to try to strengthen the bonds I have with friends and family, cut expenses, and stock up on food and supplies.
No idea if that will play out well. I'm not that worried though.
I'm a Gen Xer and this has been pretty much the state of things throughout all my life. Looking at American history this seems to be the status quo also. European history isn't much better - everything always in flux, everything always in crises.
That's what they mean by fighting to survive. The process of biological life is going against the grain. It's never easy.
I'm no economist but my career spans the "is this a depression?" recession of the early 1990's, the Y2K crash after 2000, the market collapse in 2008 and whatever the hell is coming up for us now. The 2000 crunch was the absolute worst - BY FAR. Between the Y2K work ending, the DotCom Bubble bursting, and the towers falling programmers were being let go by the tens of thousands all at once. The market was flooded with people looking for work. The 2008 recession and the recession in the early 1990's didn't have nearly that impact on developers.
So far I'm not seeing a reason to be overly concerned about this recession either. If anything, companies are going to be looking to improve efficiencies and they're going to be looking to technology to do it. As long as you're focused on saving hard dollars and you can quantify those results, then you should be fine.
What do I mean by "hard dollars"? That's actual savings, a reduction in accounts payable as a result of your work. For example, terms like "improved efficiency" are too vague - how about we improved efficiencies enough that we avoided having to hire X FTEs, or we were able to improve our sales by X% using the same staff resources, or we were able to take on X more clients as a result. Something measurable, impactful, and actual money being saved or being made. As long as you're always focused on the bottom line you should be okay.
In the past some people have responded to me by saying developers don't always get that information. That's true - but I've never worked for a company that would withhold that information when asked. Typically they're thrilled to have a developer who talks business and dollars and cents. They just assume you don't want to hear it. Ask. You should always know why you're doing what you're doing and saying that's what the BSA put into our requirements is not a good answer.
If your career has been focused on delivering cool, whiz-bang features or your revenue is largely derived from advertising - then all recessions are bad. Those developers are the first let go. Advertising slumps during recessions and companies tend to shift from whiz-bang features to belt-tightening and improving operational efficiencies.
Bottom line - companies are always interested in people who can make them or save them money. Understand your business value.
Every recession 'first hand experience', had as a backdrop a rising China and more valuable world population by the end simply by the relative size of the boomers.
China is facing serious challenges to the point that I'd stay clear of them, and the boomers are retiring. changes them from high spenders and risk takers into low spenders who don't want risk.
It's going to be a bumpy ride before the generational accounts balance out, and i fear we're going to have a shitload of grumpy old people waking up a lot poorer than they ever expected. A good recipe for even worse political decisions.
It was bound to end some time and no doubt in 2-3 years people will look back and say "man, I wish it could be like that again".
