Question for those who lost their Job at Microsoft in 2008 great recession
Oct 5, 2019
223 Comments
Hello, I'm on the cusp of deciding which company I will work for. I am on the verge of deciding between: Military Engineering Job, A Firmware Engineering Job In France, and a Microsoft offer. I have been doing research into potentially deciding to Go back to Microsoft (I've worked there before) however I was in Highschool during the Great recession.
Can anyone give me a list of warnings and lessons learned that they wish the would have known before the Bubble burst in 2008? Should I go to Microsoft KNOWING that the Bubble is beginning to burst.
comments
Also are all the dev teams using rails?
Look at Google today with 95 percent of its revenue coming from ads as one of the largest companies in the world by market cap
It's 2 completely different cases. You're comparing apples to oranges if you want to see how Google did in 08. A better comparison would be to see what a top investment bank like Goldman performed during 08
My thoughts:
- FTEs (and CSGs) were mostly isolated from the economic downturn. Sure.... maybe base salary increases were lower... but there weren’t mass layoffs.
- Applying for a job there was tough. I remember Waterloo students, for example, were lucky that their school had a special program that reserved internship spots for them. They were amongst the very few interns taken at that time.
- Microsoft in 2008 isn’t Microsoft in 2019. Just because they didn’t let people go then doesn’t mean they won’t now. Perhaps they use the opportunity to clean house. Ya just don’t know.
Supposedly, we’d already cut “deep enough”.
Well, yeah but GitHub already aggressively fires people for no real reason so that's a given.
If you are impacted then it is better if it is sudden and quick. Otherwise the environment deteriorates if people know it is coming but takes a few months or more. In such an environment people turn on each and start fighting for the scraps. Maybe leadership even lets it fester intentionally so they can increase the 'voluntary' attrition and not pay severance. In this case even if your are spared the work environment will be very bad. If you anticipate a recession and are risk averse I would take the most stable offer like the military.