Cloud infrastructure and costly web services can add up to hundreds of thousands or millions, even for relatively small companies. There will be increasing pressure to minimize these costs, and to replace high-priced services with those that have low total cost of ownership.
I’m usually a cloud true believer and choose to emphasize letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so developers can concentrate on building new features instead of spending extra hours babysitting infrastructure. But, since most software engineers are salaried, this is the time to trade time for money instead of the other way around if your company is struggling.
I’m fortunate to work at a B2B company where our clients are large health systems so for us it’s business as usual. We actually think we will grow.
I’m most likely wrong (I hope I am), but I’m worried about the long term economic effect this virus will have on the hospitals. Not right away, but over the next year. We have a large number of people needing hospital care for extended time (1 to 2 weeks), and a large number of unemployed. This will result in a lot of bankruptcies (even for people with health insurance). Will the health insurance industry be able to pay out all these clamps as well?
Anyway, I’m half expecting to see another massive bailout for hospitals, or the government just buy them outright in about a year.
Like you I also hope to see bailouts, but the biggest bailouts happen because industries that receive them have an army of experienced lobbyists.
Hospitals for better or worse have negligible presence with lobbyists and won't receive the windfalls that fossil fuel, airlines, airline manufacturers, and cruise lines will.
I am the last person who thinks the government will choose the people over the lobbyists. But something as obvious as your local hospital closing can’t go ignored by politicians.
You notice that now Trump is talking about expanding Medicare, increasing unemployment benefits, and reopening ACA enrollment and you don’t hear a peep from conservatives talking about socialism.
It’s true, the definition of socialism is when the government is helping “them” - not you.
Cloud infrastructure is just such a trivially tiny cost compared to salaries that it's barely even worth thinking about. A year of my AWS bill would barely even pay a week of an engineer's salary. Traffic has scaled up by orders of magnitude and I've only had to make a few minor tweaks to keep things running smoothly.
Surprisingly enough. Every company is not your company. We have a relatively small company but our infrastructure spend is about equal to the fully allocated cost of two or three full time developers.
Not every company just runs a three tier web app behind a load balancer.
There is almost no actionable advice in this article. It all comes across as something someone would sell as a seminar.
The end goal isn't to tell us any useful information, it's just a list of vague best practices that could be packaged up into a motivational swindle - in this case, piggybacking a global pandemic with content that isn't particularly related.
And of course it’s targeted at the audience that has the least amount of likelihood of having any significant trouble due to the pandemic.
Software developers:
In high demand (and not a healthcare worker?) Check!
Can work from home? Check!
High income? Check!
Making a guide for that kind of person’s “survival” is pretty much an insult to the doctors and nurses who are fighting not only for their patients’ survival but their own.
I apologize to John A De Goes. I don't think his profile picture is appropriate, anymore than a female developer having half her bosom showing, but that's just my opinion and no reflection on the character of anyone choosing however they choose to present themselves.
FWIW, I've worked with numerous "high-level developers" who were quite fit. Not all of them had 19" biceps like this guy, but they were all pretty athletic. I'm talking a former pro cyclists, a jujitsu coach, someone who competed Iron Man competitions well into his 50s, an ultra marathon runner, a parkour gym owner, a pro tag player (yes this is a thing), a competitive TKD sparrer, plus lots of people who work out everyday just to be healthy. My last job had a team "strong man" board where people would post up their bench/deadlift/squat numbers.
It's pretty common for great developers to have interests outside of computers.
Do your friends also flex in their profile pictures?
Edit: I'm sorry again. This article was about things you can do to present yourself well and all I'm saying is that I wouldn't hire him based his profile picture.
I don’t think we need to make it about personal appearance to criticize this article. The idea that a developer should look a particular way is toxic for the industry, and I wouldn’t want to be turned down for any job just because I didn’t look the part.
The content of the article had plenty to criticize.
Good point. You're right. I just worry about guys like that being aggressive because of testosterone supplements. I shouldn't let me fear doubt his programming abilities.
You're still making judgements based on appearance. Guy has muscles, you think he's taking testosterone supplements.
I'm sorry for making racist comments against the aliens from Galactus 5. I was just worried about how the aliens from Galactus 5 are stupid ugly aliens. I won't let my fear of the crazy stupid aliens from Galactus 5 get to me, I'm sure they are good programmers.
Similar articles just show how spoiled and priviledged the authors truly are.
I've seen some baffling things here on HN too, such as people preferring to only be informed using push notifications about the crisis, personalized for their area, nothing else, because that's more convenient than looking up information, or the other day, deciding to block COVID-19 related news entirely, instead of selecting a trusted news source and rationing their exposure to the media.
Is it so baffling that people are getting tired of reading about COVID-19 though? I mean, I've been in quarantine for at least 1 month now, and gonna be at least 2 more weeks. I'd like to read about other things than COVID-19, especially since I can't really take any other action than to stay at home, especially because it would be illegal for me to not be at home.
So yeah, I'm one of the people who have started removing and blocking things that are mentioning COVID-19, since I can't really do anything about it. Once something actionable comes up, I'll hear it in the official press conferences from my country's government.
I guess luckily, my HN blocker only blocks mentions of COVID-19 and "corona virus", so the keyword "Coronapocalypse" managed to get through, and here I am...
I think it again comes down to one's priviledge. If you have the possibility to isolate yourself for months and you don't have to worry about anyone else, you may be able to afford to block the news entirely.
Everyone else needs to read the news (5 minutes a day is enough), because it may contain important information. Consider how you may miss a changed bus schedule announced on a local news site with "due to coronavirus" in the title. Same thing about the local supermarket, you may get home without food while exposing yourself and your family to additional risk. You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.
Reading the news is crucial for most of us during this period, we just have to do it responsibly.
I would never know about bus and local supermarket hours and changes through the news in any of the two cities that I lived in my life (Sao Paulo and Los Angeles). I would (and I did) find the supermarket and the bus company websites. That's not "news".
Cutting all news is a good strategy for some people for improving mental health. Just like anyone can have a cabinet full of chocolate and just control themselves to each a small piece twice a week, but it's much more efficient to just not have chocolate at all at home.
Also, the general tone of people that don't want to read news anymore is that they personally don't want it for themselves only. So, that's unrelated to people that consider it crucial and want to do it responsibly.
Lastly, I've seen this desire of consuming less or no news in a lot of people that are not the "HN crowd" or privileged people in terms of money.
> I would never know about bus and local supermarket hours and changes through the news in any of the two cities that I lived in my life (Sao Paulo and Los Angeles). I would (and I did) find the supermarket and the bus company websites. That's not "news".
That was your experience before this crisis. I've got hold of such information from a local news site a week ago, while official sites remained unchanged for a couple more days. I'm sure there are places where everything is well oiled, but for most of us things don't just snap into place and we need to be aware of our surroundings as much as it's tolerable for our mental health.
Checking the news once a day for 15 minutes is more than sufficient. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people aren’t on Twitter, don’t know what push notifications are, and really don’t need to do anything other than stay at home, wear a mask, and avoid others. Constantly refreshing media sites really isn’t productive or helpful.
searching "{bus route} {city} coronavirus" or "{grocery store location} coronavirus" is a much more effective way of getting this information than just reading the local news headlines for five minutes and hoping you see all the information that's relevant to you. polling the news every morning is not a good strategy for retrieving specific factual info.
when it comes to more complex things like "how bad is coronavirus about to be in the west?" reading the news for five minutes isn't nearly enough. for each story, you need to read writeups from several different publications before you can reconstitute anything like an accurate picture of what is happening. pick any important story and read the corresponding articles in the ny times, wsj, and maybe the washington post. it's really staggering how differently they present the facts (and which ones they choose to present at all). it takes a lot of work to come away from reading the news more informed rather than less.
Some of the replies are focusing too much on specific examples rather than applying the idea in general. Checking out a local news source and government announcements once a day during a crisis may expose you to information that you wouldn't know to look up, and that information may be vital.
Yeah, true, too focused on specifics. We also seem to come from vastly different sides of this coin, where if you can trust the government to have accurate, true and recent information published as soon as they have it, government resources are enough while in other places (like China, US or Russia for example), governments are a lot less trusted and reliable, and you might need to look up local news to get the full picture.
Thanks for sticking with us, explaining your viewpoint further :)
I'm sorry, I don't have the "possibility" to isolate myself, it's literally illegal for me to be outside right now!
As I said, all of things that impact us in our country, is told by us from the national government. Such as how you should act when going to the supermarket, if you need to present papers, what reasons you're allowed to be outside for and so on. Going through the news to get that information is just introducing unnecessary middlemen for information you get from either press conferences or straight from the government websites.
Everyone does not need to read the news. Follow the official guidelines, that's enough, and read them from the source. Then for the people who want to follow the news, follow it. But it's not a requirement for staying alive. At least where I live (YMMV).
> You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.
Yeah, if they made it illegal to be outside without official papers, the government press conference would mention this + there would be information about this on the government websites. You're putting too much importance on "news" when there are official sources to hear/read from.
There's nothing wrong or right about being privileged. It is for many people inescapable. There is definitely something wrong with being ignorant of your own privilege though.
Why should I feel bad because a starfish doesn't have legs? The privilege meme is ultimately pointless because it argues that there is an objective measure of something that is fundamentally subjective. Really the primary goal shouldn't be to care about who you are. Instead you should focus on positive sum thinking. Find ways to help people in a way that doesn't drag others down.
>Really the primary goal shouldn't be to care about who you are.
i don't understand at all what you're talking about. privilege isn't about you. it's exactly about other people relative to you and empathizing with them despite being that much more privileged.
the article is explicitly targeting white collar tech workers. of course it's a privileged take. this isn't a callout so much as restating the intro of the article.
not many, unless you're deciding right now whether to renew your lease for the next year. this is an odd thing to pick on though.
> As others have discussed, one can minimize the impact of a recession by maximizing one’s personal runway, which involves cost-cutting measures (including, potentially, re-location to areas with a lower cost of living).
in context, this is a brief aside where he's explaining that he's not going to cover general cost-cutting in your personal life. it's tangential to the topic addressed by the article.
Finding a remote job as a developer has been next to impossible. Hopefully that will change after this. I also hope that we will see less centralization in general.
That's very true. I'm also a software professional looking for work, and so far my network has been a good source of promising leads.
On the cash front, in addition to the importance of having reserves, I'd suggest that the importance of having multiple revenue streams has never been clearer.
Having multiple revenue streams doesn’t help when the entire economy is screwed.
During the last recession, I was a full time software engineer, a part time fitness instructor/personal trainer and had real estate holdings.
Guess how my alternate income streams worked out when no one was spending money? I sold off all of my rental real estate (in an area that still hasn’t recovered), I stopped trying to get personal fitness classes and scaled back teaching to just a “working hobby” and doubled down in software engineering, building skills and a network.
When the company I worked for finally did collapse in late 2010, I was able to get a couple of contracts until I found a full time gig.
Having multiple revenue streams doesn’t help when the entire economy is screwed.
This is true. A couple on my block are an architect, and a yoga instructor. Two very diverse income streams.
Now both are unemployed.
A guy I sold a web site to was one of those people who was big on diversity of income.
His portfolio covered everything from hotel services to restaurants to antiques restoration to a couple of small factories. All are closed. His diverse income is gone.
While I understand the “average Joe” is not in the position that software engineers are in, I’m just going to address software engineering since we are on a technical site.
In software engineering, you don’t need “multiple income streams” to stay solvent. You just need a set of skills that are in sync with the market, good interviewing techniques, a strong network, and cash to tide you over and keep your expenses reasonable. This time is not a recession. It’s a true worldwide epidemic. But during “normal” recessions, if you have what I outlined above, someone somewhere will hire you at least as a contractor at some rate.
Of course if you overly specialized it might be harder.
The dot com bust wasn’t that bad if you were just a regular old enterprise developer working at a profitable company that wasn’t directly or indirectly dependent on VC money. Even in 2008, there were companies hiring hired gun contractors at lower rates.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. We have the privilege of working in an industry in which we can gain experience in nearly any sub-field using online resources. If you were laid off from your $oldTech job, there are dozens of $newTech that can be learned in your newly-found free time for next to no cost.
I'd suggest that the importance of having multiple revenue streams has never been clearer.
I'd say that even more important is picking the right employer. The next time you apply for a job, ask what the company did during the virus. If it didn't take care of its employees during COVID, it's not going to suddenly be a good company now.
If the company didn't exist during COVID, I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask what the leaders were doing during COVID and how they treated their people at those companies.
I have never really worried about whether a company was going to “take care of me”. when choosing jobs. Companies are out for themselves first and foremost. Don’t ever drink the Kool-Aid. The only person who is going to take care of you is you. Someone once told me early in my career to “always keep your running shoes around your neck”.
I haven’t seen any evidence that the company I work for isn’t ethical or as employee focus as they can be. But things happen, management changes, companies get acquired, the market changes etc.
Actually being taken care of, no. But relying on their employers to take care of them and do the right thing, yes. This is an eye-opening event for a lot of people.
I’m usually a cloud true believer and choose to emphasize letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so developers can concentrate on building new features instead of spending extra hours babysitting infrastructure. But, since most software engineers are salaried, this is the time to trade time for money instead of the other way around if your company is struggling.
I’m fortunate to work at a B2B company where our clients are large health systems so for us it’s business as usual. We actually think we will grow.