Ask HN: Assume the tech bubble will burst soon. How should programmers prepare?
TechCrunch ran a pretty opinionated article (http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/26/the-tech-industry-is-in-denial-but-the-bubble-is-about-to-burst/), and it got me wondering about the implications of the author's conclusions.
Given I'm a developer who is considering a change of jobs, I'm especially interested in which companies would be relatively safe during a tech industry contraction. I'm assuming startups would be most vulnerable and mainstays would be most protected. Thoughts?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] threadLet's assume that "the bubble is bursting" takes the form of there just not being a lot of available funding, and of general shakiness in the market.
So, the first thing to go will be companies that don't have a solid revenue stream. A lot of folks are all "fuck revenue mindless growth go go go", and once the VC life-support is removed they'll shrivel up and die.
The next thing will be that investors will be super conservative all of the sudden--just as we saw following the 90s. A lot of companies will take PE deals that'll probably screw them and destroy chances at good exits for founders and employees.
The long-term thing will be the acquisition of company's IP portfolios by companies taking advantage of fire sales, or investors looking to liquidate what they can to make their money back. This will bring about a lot of patent trolling, and other comedy. That'll take a while, though.
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For the tech side, though, things will be interesting.
First, hiring will become a lot harder for everyone involved. Developers will be used to high salaries, and when they can't get them because bad funding, they'll be in for a rude surprise. It'll take a while for people on the coasts to learn what the midwest has known for years: programmers, removed from inflationary costs of living, are pretty cheap.
Second, the style of development will likely change. The merry outsourcing of all things IT and infrastructure to the Cloud goes away when the already-absurd AWS and GCE and Heroku bills start stacking up without investor money to pay them. The magical snowflake syndrome of frameworks and bespoke svg widgets and general excess supported by easy cash will go away (hopefully).
Third, entire sectors of developer-to-developer and first-world-problems apps will just dry up, for reasons explained above.
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What to do?
I'd suggest boning up on native development, SQL, and everything that is in demand in line-of-business application programming. I'd also rediscover and refresh on how to live in a Cloudless world: how to provision and administer servers, how to do networking, and generally how to be an engineer using only bubblegum and ducttape. If you can do that, you'll be fine.