[komali2]

Saw this happen in Houston in 2014. Engineers that had started their careers just after the housing crisis bounced back were sitting cozy on their 150k/year (in Houston that's gobs) roles, not really putting much into savings because "there's always Wells to drill."

When prices dropped from 90$ to 44$ a barrel, I saw candidates do some pretty stupid shit. Nuked the reminder of their savings on a new f150 was a classic drama played out over 2 weeks that my whole team was involved trying to talk him down in. Others had to move in with their parents, take roles in deer Park that were something like 2.5hr commutes one way, drop everything for a Saudi role and move out there... Their freedom of choice was essentially yanked away.

The only one that seemed to be handling it well was a fresh 3 years in engineer. No girlfriend, kids, house, and buckets of savings. He moved to Vietnam and weathered the storm on a beach, taking tiny sips of his savings.

This was a time when rates dropped from 160, 150/hr to 60, sometimes lower. Some people had to take rate cuts to keep their roll (I didn't even know that was a thing. I assumed layoffs was the only tool in the belt-tightening toolkit).

Somehow a big Operator (think shell, Exxon) got a new project out for a refinery once, which resulted in something like 50 different engineering and design rolls, of which my agency locked down iirc 10? We had, in the city alone, 600 applicants, about half a good fit for the job (and the other half decent just not the exact fit).

I don't know if the same thing could happen in my new life as a web dev, but the lesson stuck with me. When I hop on LinkedIn and see 1000 new frontend roles, it seems hopping out here in the bay area. But I also watched hack reactor crank out 60 more kids 6 weeks after my batch, and 60 more 6 weeks after that... So maybe I got lucky, got in while the getting is still hot.

Anyway, save your money.

[vitaflo]

>I don't know if the same thing could happen in my new life as a web dev

Anyone who lived through the dot-com bust in 2000 knows very well that it can happen. Many tech companies went under and almost all had massive layoffs. If you were one of the unfortunate, there were no jobs to be had. Most people I worked with during that time went into a completely different career field because they simply couldn't find work. It was all rainbows and roses until it wasn't.

[bdcravens]

My experience in the 2000 bust was that there were too many programmers. The market was flooded with dead weight who should have been in sales or management or baristas, but there just happened to be roles to fill.

[foobiekr]

My experience in 2000 was that experienced, hard-core coders and systems guys ended up dumped on the market with a ton of HTMLgrammer chum and simultaneously all of the big employers had instituted hiring freezes. Good people on the street for 6+ months, not just the pretenders.

[at-fates-hands]

>> I don't know if the same thing could happen in my new life as a web dev,

Doubtful TBH

"Front-end dev" here in the Midwest. Even when the economy tanked in 2008, I barely noticed and I was working as a contractor. I still had recruiters calling for contract work. We had a lot more people come into the industry via the banks and small businesses who went under in the crash, but even then, it wasn't a huge deal.

I'm always hedging my bets the bottom will fall out eventually. Even when people thought our roles would drop off, whoosh suddenly everybody wanted to convert all their stuff to Javascript apps and everything took off again.

Right now, more back-en devs are getting into the JS scene and "full stack" development is back in vogue. I still concentrate heavily on the UI/UX side and have been picking up JS work more and more. There's such a shortage of good JS developers that if you're a mid to senior level JS developer, you're going to have tons of options and a solid future.

If you don't want to do contract work, land a stable role at a large corporation and hunker down for a few years and see which way the wind blows then.

[CondensedBrain]

>> "Even when people thought our roles would drop off, whoosh suddenly everybody wanted to convert all their stuff to Javascript apps and everything took off again."

Prediction: the next one will snap back on people looking to turn everything into WASM apps.

[foobiekr]

2008 was not a tech crash.

[bdcravens]

(I'm in Spring, north of Houston)

I didn't really see that, but I wasn't as involved in the community at that time. Of course, the company I work for is in no way tied to the economy of Houston (and outside of that, I've done a lot of remote in my career)