Author Topic: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?  (Read 3147 times)

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Offline james_s

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #25 on: March 24, 2020, 10:53:15 pm »
You'll get no argument from me on that. I'm a big proponent of universal healthcare and a robust safety net, that seems to come as a surprise to many who make assumptions on my views based on other views. I have no party allegiance and hold a mix of views from conservative to liberal and everything in between depending on the topic. I've always been a lone wolf by nature and am repelled by tribalistic behavior and groupthink.

Nothing fundamental is going to change in time for this mess though, even under ideal circumstances it will likely take decades to get to that point. I fear that ultimately nothing will really get done, I mean we never really fixed any of the problems that led to the last financial meltdown and the lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic will be short lived. Once things have gotten back to normal it will stop being s priority and preparing for the next pandemic or other disaster will return to being something we can deal with "later".
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #26 on: March 24, 2020, 11:18:20 pm »
Nothing fundamental is going to change in time for this mess though, even under ideal circumstances it will likely take decades to get to that point. I fear that ultimately nothing will really get done, I mean we never really fixed any of the problems that led to the last financial meltdown and the lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic will be short lived. Once things have gotten back to normal it will stop being s priority and preparing for the next pandemic or other disaster will return to being something we can deal with "later".

Yeah I think so too.
You can even be sure that some people are already working on taking advantage of the crisis instead of learning anything from it.
 

Offline julianhigginson

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #27 on: March 27, 2020, 04:22:51 am »
To perfectly honest the best thing the populace could do is demand an end to the shut down and let the chips fall where they may.    It is pretty simple, the longer the shut down the more damage we do to the economy.    Dome may think that that is horrible but the reality is the only reasons we have a shut down is to make life easy for the medical industry.    Any argument that they are containing the virus is nonsense considering the virus is world wide now.   Those that are likely to die from the virus will no matter what until there is a valid treatment.

Aaaah. Another person who doesn't understand exponential functions.....  The next month in the US is going to be pretty eye opening for you.

Anyway - while we're here, just how many human beings is it OK to allow to die, locked away from their families and slowly drowning in their own mucus, just so so "the economy" doesn't get hiccups?

See the thing is - the economy may be an extremely large and complex system that all our lives are caught up in, but it's not a living thing. it can be stopped, paused, restarted, paused again, manipulated, and tuned to serve any need *we* decide it should, if we want that enough.
 

Offline julianhigginson

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #28 on: March 27, 2020, 04:31:36 am »
But you can't just press the pause button for s bit and then resume, the world doesn't stop turning. While we are all stuck at home we are still consuming food, water, energy, all manner of services, and somebody has to make or provide all of that. There is a whole supply chain involved in getting food on our tables, from the obvious stuff like farm workers down to all of the equipment makers, mechanics, chemical companies, fuel, truckers, road maintenance, spare parts, and dozens of other interconnected pieces. The people living in densely populated urban areas which is most people are utterly dependent on a functional economy for survival, we can't just shut it down. Disruptions cause ripples that propagate throughout the whole system and the effects can be catastrophic.

this is why to maintain the 80%+ society-wide isolation that's required to get the transmission rate below 1, we need to hold everyone at home besides the people that actually produce the things we really need to live. And then we have very rigid anti-disease protocols in place for that reduced group of people, and keep a super close look at their health and monitor and trace any disease moving through their ranks...
 

Offline james_s

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #29 on: March 27, 2020, 04:42:57 am »
Aaaah. Another person who doesn't understand exponential functions.....  The next month in the US is going to be pretty eye opening for you.

Anyway - while we're here, just how many human beings is it OK to allow to die, locked away from their families and slowly drowning in their own mucus, just so so "the economy" doesn't get hiccups?

See the thing is - the economy may be an extremely large and complex system that all our lives are caught up in, but it's not a living thing. it can be stopped, paused, restarted, paused again, manipulated, and tuned to serve any need *we* decide it should, if we want that enough.


To me it looks like a lose-lose situation. Our lives are inextricably tangled with the economy. Hundreds of millions of people are utterly dependent on the economy to have food, water, shelter, medicine and every other need. It's not like the old days where many people lived on farms that could be somewhat self sufficient, today vast numbers of people live in cities without a farm in sight. If the economy collapses completely we could end up with millions of people unemployed, homeless, facing shortages of food and clean water, no access to health care.

So do we let them die locked away in a hospital or do we let them die alongside tens of thousands of others dying in packed shanty towns and camps as the virus continues to spread unchecked. It's a delicate balance, the shutdown we are doing is much like using chemotherapy to battle cancer, you just have to hope that the patient is resilient enough that the cancer dies before the whole body shuts down and packs in. We need to try to slow the spread but the economy is absolutely vital to the whole effort. We need to keep people fed, clothed, housed, we need to keep the hospitals staffed, the transportation system running, food needs to keep coming in and being distributed and sold, everything is interdependent, you simply can't just pause the entire thing for 6 months or whatever and expect it to start back up again. I can't just stop eating, stop consuming energy, and put myself in stasis, the world keeps turning.
 
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Offline julianhigginson

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Re: If COVID-19 causes a recession, will it be harder to get a job in tech?
« Reply #30 on: March 27, 2020, 04:54:20 am »
sure, it's definitely a lose-lose situation... it'd be great if this never happened, but it is happening and the time to do something is actually a couple of months ago. But now is the closest to that we have.

I'm just horrified that some people think it's better to lose a bunch of people's lives than mess at all with the economy. (which to be honest has been pretty much a dead horse before this happened anyway)

The thing is, at the end of the day what we have, is a small portion of humanity who maintain *all* of our lives with their labour. (funnily enough, mostly these people are very poorly paid) while everyone else faffs around doing all sorts of other things that could actually be allowed to run down and yeah, maybe it'd suck a bit, but nobody (ok... a lot less) would die.

if we didn't need to insist on entirely unrelated ideas like "profit" and "rent" (yeah, and "wages") we could make it so these people (or others who normally do other things but would like to be active, and can be trained well enough) are supported and protected to go about their work of keeping us all alive while the conditions that allow propagation of this virus are ended.

And then we could get back to all the other stuff afterwards, if it still felt like such a good idea...
« Last Edit: March 27, 2020, 05:23:02 am by julianhigginson »
 


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