Ask HN: Assuming there's a bubble, how do we mitigate its damages?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474707

by dataker • 11 years ago

6 2 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

taprun• 11 years ago

If you're asking from a personal standpoint: I would imagine that you'd want to reduce your debt, cut your expenses and increase your personal liquidity.

davismwfl• 11 years ago

Assuming you mean personally and career wise and not as an industry.

What you will see is that the people that moved into Tech because of "easy" money will move on and will have a hard time finding work they likely weren't qualified for to begin with. Those with experience and a solid base of skills won't notice much of an issue. Yes, it will take a little longer to find a position if you want to move around, capital won't be as freely available, but if you are good at what you do work will be available.

So personally, make sure your skills are solid, stay up to date and network with friends and others. Make sure some people you network with are in enterprise level companies so that if the time comes you can use those contacts to help you move to a more enterprise role (assuming you are not in one now). When the dot com bubble burst that is exactly what I and some friends did and we barely noticed anything, hell a couple got raises. I also eventually started a consultancy during the downturn and we did awesome during that time because companies didn't want to hire FTE's and were happy to use us instead. Also, it was nice to see the greedy money seekers without skills get booted by the market. It pained me to see non tech people getting development jobs and being paid as if they were qualified developers when they weren't. Mind you, there were some that rocked and deserved every penny, but they also never had to worry about work either. And I never cared if they were paid commensurate with their level of experience, but it torqued me seeing a new grad with a non-tech degree and no experience getting paid $60-70k/year when I knew very qualified devs getting that or just a bit more.

Also, something I personally believe, for each successive year that passes software becomes further ingrained into everything in our lives Engineers become a necessity to keep around. It used to be companies could downsize R&D and cut support Engineers to the bone to save costs. They can't really do that anymore without risking significant revenue. Not to say Software Engineers are without fail or always safe, but as software continues to eat the world it becomes harder to dispose of us without consequences. There is a side affect to this too, it can lead to Engineers becoming a commodity that is easily found and traded, but at this point I don't think that is really valid nor will it be for a significant time.

Ask HN: Assuming there's a bubble, how do we mitigate its damages?

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