Say Nothing, Wave Goodbye To Your Software Engineers

Companies, the world has changed and you need to wake up and step up.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Darkness before the Dawn

In the middle stages of 2020 in a direct response to the initial shock of the Covid-19 pandemic to the economy, many companies immediately froze both hiring programmes and salary reviews for their engineers.

Initially, this was enacted to immediately save costs in order to deal with a general ‘cash flow crisis’ as many business either curtailed or completely shut down their operations due to various lockdown measures legislated around the world.

The knock-on effect of this would be felt by the software industry much more strongly than any direct effect.

After all, much of the commercial software produced tended to be supplied to third party operations either as part of someone else’s product or running on behalf of someone else’s company. As many industries also tried to cut their outgoings as their own operations dried up, so would their purchasing.

The whole food chain effectively begin to starve from the bottom up¹.

As software for its own sake, directly supplied to users via App Stores and suchlike, it was little affected and in some cases as with the nefarious video conferencing industry…