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0 pointsryandrake3y ago0 comments

Congratulations on your lucky career timing! Like many in HN's demographic, if you started 13 years ago (2010) or less, then you've so far never had to work in a bear market. Actually your timing is astonishing, entering the industry right after the last downturn. Well done :)

In an extended bear market / downturn, throw that ratio out the window. Unless you're literally John Carmack or Ken Thompson, you're not going to just have headhunters begging you to work at their companies. In fact, even fishing expeditions from recruiters are going to quickly die out. You'll have to apply--a lot! You'll have to struggle to stay on your recruiters' radars. You'll have to follow-up, pinging for updates, "let me know how I can help move this forward" and so on. Things aren't just going to fall into your lap. This will be the case until we flip back to a bull market and hiring returns to "normal."

BTW my discipline is embedded / mobile development and then project management. Not that I think it matters--macroeconomic effects tend to hit uniformly across engineering disciplines.

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dclowd99013y ago

Ryan Drake, the person I was responding to said, in general terms, that it is not as easy to land a job as they may have expected with numbers of difficulty an entire order of magnitude higher (or 2!) than existing anecdote.

Dot com bust was 1999; I came in around 2009, right after the Great Recession, one of the worst economic periods in recorded history. That’s the data. All of it. I’m not sure who the person I replied to got their data, but we’re talking about approximately 24 years of it, and most of those years were pretty damn good. So unless that person hasn’t moved jobs in the last decade and a half, they would certainly not be warning people, in general terms, about the impacts of a downturn economy. Either that, or their experience is rather singular. Looking at posts across Reddit and Hacker News, and the general consensus of people in this industry, it seems like this person is far outside the norm of employment viability.

Tech as a developer is still, far and away, the best job market to enter.

cameronh903y ago

I started my career in 2008 in the UK, just as the GFC was hitting, with no degree. Yet, I had a ratio like 5:5:4.

I assumed the UK had it worse than the USA, but maybe not?

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