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We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant ca

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...? I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile. With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively. I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.

Ididntdothis 6y ago
“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“ I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.
- aidos 6y ago
  We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.
  - datingscientist 6y ago
    Consumer debt will make this harder.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... How much is that as a fraction of the value of an average family home in your location? If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      “If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.“ I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated even more on wealthy people and big companies.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        The destruction of AirBnB may push rents down. Hard to see how rent can go up beyond what people can actually afford?
        Ididntdothis 6y ago
        Rent, health care, education and housing cost can go up to a level that it eats up most income for average people. That seems to be the trend.
throwaway8291 6y ago
It's an artificial scarcity, though. We have the most productive technologies ever - we are just not very good to put a better part of them flow towards common good. The amount of senseless applications and waste is staggering.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Good points. Plus the demand for tech is higher than ever due to the productivity advantage. There are pockets of that common-good advantage being demonstrated here and there, so maybe that can be patternized and better demonstrated to the whole. I'm sure there are immediately applicable ways to redirect a lot of the waste.
_curious_ 6y ago
"...watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months." LOL "I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance." Everyone? Not a chance. You and I who have previously experienced and survived the closest to it? Maybe.
realtalk_sp 6y ago
For a lot of people who hang out here, this amounts to baseless FUD. Technology is not going to contract any time soon. Quite the opposite. It's also really hard to build and distribute technology products well. Good software engineers and tech sector employees will continue to be in high demand for quite a while. There might be an interim period of depressed income but that will also likely correlate with reductions in cost of living, as a consequence of the same macro factors. The key is that a good technology employee making wise career choices will continue to be able to live somewhere towards the front of the standard-of-living curve. What might be lost for a while are some of the more extreme tail outcomes (in the many millions of $s) that had become a bit too easily realized in this latest iteration of frothy tech bubbles. Not a big deal. Most of us won't notice any difference.
hurricanetc 6y ago
You don’t need to worry about people under 30. Every older generation thinks every younger generation isn’t going to handle things well. And every single time, they are wrong.

Ididntdothis 6y ago

“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“ I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.

aidos 6y ago
We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.
- datingscientist 6y ago
  Consumer debt will make this harder.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... How much is that as a fraction of the value of an average family home in your location? If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    “If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.“ I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated even more on wealthy people and big companies.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      The destruction of AirBnB may push rents down. Hard to see how rent can go up beyond what people can actually afford?
      - Ididntdothis 6y ago
        Rent, health care, education and housing cost can go up to a level that it eats up most income for average people. That seems to be the trend.

throwaway8291 6y ago

It's an artificial scarcity, though. We have the most productive technologies ever - we are just not very good to put a better part of them flow towards common good. The amount of senseless applications and waste is staggering.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Good points. Plus the demand for tech is higher than ever due to the productivity advantage. There are pockets of that common-good advantage being demonstrated here and there, so maybe that can be patternized and better demonstrated to the whole. I'm sure there are immediately applicable ways to redirect a lot of the waste.

_curious_ 6y ago

"...watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months." LOL "I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance." Everyone? Not a chance. You and I who have previously experienced and survived the closest to it? Maybe.

realtalk_sp 6y ago

For a lot of people who hang out here, this amounts to baseless FUD. Technology is not going to contract any time soon. Quite the opposite. It's also really hard to build and distribute technology products well. Good software engineers and tech sector employees will continue to be in high demand for quite a while. There might be an interim period of depressed income but that will also likely correlate with reductions in cost of living, as a consequence of the same macro factors. The key is that a good technology employee making wise career choices will continue to be able to live somewhere towards the front of the standard-of-living curve. What might be lost for a while are some of the more extreme tail outcomes (in the many millions of $s) that had become a bit too easily realized in this latest iteration of frothy tech bubbles. Not a big deal. Most of us won't notice any difference.

hurricanetc 6y ago

You don’t need to worry about people under 30. Every older generation thinks every younger generation isn’t going to handle things well. And every single time, they are wrong.