| Two nights ago at work a co-worker was asking me why I seem unafraid to take risks; after all I am the sole income earner for my household. I explained that I’ve mostly lived my life with the theory that “they fire everyone eventually” and so when, not long after graduation in mid-1999, I experienced the dotcom implosion, 9/11, the extreme rise of offshoring (and the endless lies from management that their goals were not, at the time, to offshore all engineering for cost), and so on, the world was living up to my expectations. While I’ve never been fired or laid off, I knew people - very good people - who did and went 6 to 18 months unable to find a new job in a different Silicon Valley - one of layoffs and hiring freezes that didn’t thaw for years, one where startup investment plummeted and the stock gains evaporated. I spent a great deal of time in my pre-CS degree days involved in the rise and crash of Japan in the nineties and the US recession around that time; I’d seen it before and so I lived my life assuming I’d need to weather it. Wealth, security and opportunity evaporated at once. They are not unrelated. Co-worker is young. He noted that when he went to a startup some years ago, and people asked him why he would risk it, his answer was he’d just find another job or come back. I am unafraid because I know in my bones that the world can change on a dime so I’ve always been conservative and prepared; practices (professional and financial), frugality and savings. He is unafraid because he’s never known the job market that wasn’t hot in the Bay Area. He graduated in 2009. At least I resolved a mystery for him. In the 2000s when he was in high school, he told his counselor that he wanted to do computers. The counselor said, “Are you crazy? All of that’s going to be done in India.” Until our conversation he didn’t understand that exchange. All of this is a very long way of saying that yes, the world you know can turn on a dime and the invariants aren’t. |