Clojurians Log v2

👋

Yesterday was pretty crazy. I was supposed to be leaving my current company (☕), and starting a new job (:clojure:) near the end of next month. Due to the ever-worsening financial situation at my current company, my last day here will be Friday, and I should be starting my new job next Thursday

Wait, you were supposed to leave but because of the financial problems, you can't leave yet?

Because of the financial problems I'm leaving sooner

I should have finished on 25th June, now I'm finishing on Friday

Oh, I misunderstood your comment. Er, congrats on the new job I guess?

I guess it wasn't clear that the leaving and starting were both supposed to be "near the end of next month"

I remember a company I was working for, on a Monday told us all everything was great, and the next day said "Oh, sorry, one of our big customers has deferred their order and we can't pay you past tomorrow". So Wednesday we were all unemployed 😐

I was out of work for about three months when that company imploded.

We sort of knew that things were going badly (we always here how good our sales pipeline is, but nothing ever comes of it), but we're already down to what was considered barebones (~35 compared to over 100, 18 months ago), and had been told that even if sales weren't good, we wouldn't lose more people

But sales have been spectacularly bad, and we've lost a lot of customers

A startup?

No, the company is nearly 20 years old. Raised £10 million about 3 years ago (IPO), and wasted it

Ouch.

Where I work now, they've been in business about 20 years and never taken outside funding. There's just 12 of us but we seem to be stable.

Redundancies last January, furloughs/redundancies last March (very few of those came back), now more furloughs

Also 6 months of "voluntary" salary reductions for everyone last year

Wow, that just screams poor management. Sorry.

Yeah, the CEO and CFO would have been kicked out by the board already if it weren't for covid, I think

The slightly amusing part is that I originally asked to be allowed to leave at the end of this month, and they said no, I had to work 2 months notice

So it works out well for me - I get to start as a Clojure developer sooner

12 developers, or 12 people in the whole company?

Morning!

The whole company. We have just two Clojure devs on the backend and two JS devs on the frontend. Supporting 40+ websites and millions of users 24x7. Because Clojure lets us do this.

And 113K lines of Clojure on the backend. Not sure how much JS on the frontend.

morning

I wonder where the world goes in terms of job security for experienced (aka. old) programmers. Conventionally I would say there isn't much to fear, but technically : ) I can too easily imagine several future scenarios where overall conditions worsen. What I realized retrospecting on the dotcom bubble and the 2009 "software bug", was that I want to work somewhere where the industry is such, that just by the nature of it, I am shielded somewhat from world events, at least temporarily. It might be selfish to leave risky work for others, but there is so little sense in whatever everyone is doing, that taking risk for it - to me just seemed pointless. I was lucky to be able to work at such a company so in fact we do better in the pandemic, I had lots of time to learn clojurescript.

Jobs are never totally secure - here we've made a lot of people redundant. At my last job a lot of (non-developers) were made redundant after a takeover. At the one before that we had redundancies, and at another time some people were fired "for performance related reasons" (without prior warning) because the new CEO wanted to show that he wasn't like the old one, and told managers that they needed to get rid of some people (this was a 700 person company, made up of what had originally been separate companies, across the world)

In each of those cases (apart from the one where it was only non-developers), that included developers with 10+ years' experience

Loyalty doesn't matter in these cases for sure.

morning

and good to hear that you have new job lined up @djm_uk

Morning

Job security seems really rare these days. Over here in the US, several states have what they call “at will” employment which means that you can quit with no notice if you want but also that you can be let go with no notice as well. When I worked at Macromedia during the dot-com bubble bursting, they came through the IT department one day, quietly tapped people on the shoulder and led them away — they didn’t even get to clear their desk (they had to come back to security a week later to get personal effects). They let 25% of IT go that day, at all levels. After that, I was working for a startup for a while and that was the “good Monday, bad Tuesday” place where they just let the whole IT team go on the Wednesday, and kept their creative team because they still had clients for them. All of us were senior developers there, and had been with the startup anywhere from three months to a year. I’ve been at my current place for over a decade now and they hardly ever let anyone go and the whole team is very loyal and stable. I’m kind of hoping to stay there now until I retire — I’m nearly 59 and don’t relish interviewing for IT jobs at that age over here: a lot of young managers in IT would consider me “too old”, regardless of my experience.

How is the UK market for older developers these days?

I can't say, been working for a single company since I moved to the UK 😐

What is 'older' here @seancorfield

The people I've worked with that were significantly older than me were either contractors or long time employees of one company

I guess it depends on the specific company. At Macromedia (early aughts) I was one of the older staff members in IT, but when Adobe bought us it seemed like I suddenly became one of the younger staff members 🙂

IBM had lots of older folks, when I started plenty of people old enough to be my parent. And there are still lots of people who have been there forever.

I'm not there yet, but based on people I've worked with, people don't have any trouble up to their mid-forties or so. No idea about after that