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The black swan of 2020, the coronavirus, changed how the whole world works. More than 4 million people worldwide have been infected. Flights are grounded, schools are closed, and companies have sent everyone to work from home. Workers who cannot work from home have had their pay cut, or been laid off. In April, the US lost more than 20 million jobs. Over the past six weeks, initial jobless claims in the US have totaled 33 million, and the unemployment rate has climbed to 14.7%. The scale of unemployment now is roughly twice that of the 2008 financial crisis. Only the Great Depression of 1933, with its 25.5% unemployment rate, is comparable.
Since March, watching the news in the US has meant anxiety every day. California announced a statewide stay-at-home order, and it has now been almost two months. Many businesses cannot hold on and are filing for bankruptcy. I know many people right now may be infected, or have family infected, or have taken a pay cut or lost their job, or cannot attend school, or are about to graduate into a job market full of uncertainty, or have had their study abroad plans completely overturned. Everything changed so suddenly. Nobody could have predicted it or prepared for it. All we can do, right now, is ask whether the crisis we are facing is actually a good opportunity to re-examine our life plans.
My Own Low Point in 2012
If you have read my earlier posts, you know that when I finished my master’s degree in 2012, I sent out more than 800 applications and did not land a single full-time job. I had to start with an unpaid internship, and at my poorest I had less than $1,000 left in the bank (see the details in The Most Important Thing in Life: The Biggest Supporter Behind the Scenes). Back then my applications were rejected every day, and my phone interviews were rejected too. The internship was originally going to hire me full time, but the US federal government shut down in 2012 over budget problems, and the school research funding that would have hired me was frozen. The unpaid internship stretched from one month to three, and then to five, and at every internship review I heard no good news about being hired.
But it was also during that time that I started to think carefully. I had always been bad at chemistry. The environmental science experiments I did in graduate school were nothing special. Spending ten-plus hours in the lab on experiments was painful, and writing my thesis gave me headaches. Did I really want to spend my career doing something I did not much like, and was not very good at? Doing a half-hearted job for decades until I retire?
On the other hand, because I needed to process data, I started learning to code. I loved how quickly I could find out whether the computer understood the logic I had written. Most importantly, all the work could be done on my computer. I did not need to go anywhere to get my work done, and I did not need to worry, the way I did during my master’s research, about poisoning myself by mishandling chemicals.
A decision that looks obvious in hindsight was very hard to make at the time. I knew my grades were poor and my research ability unremarkable. But was I really going to give up six years of university and graduate education, and start over learning a completely different skill? I was very interested in my first steps, but what if I stopped liking it after a few months? And no matter how hard I worked, how could I ever catch up with the geniuses who had been coding since childhood, or the engineers who majored in computer science or electrical engineering and had multiple internships behind them? (See My NTU Talk: 6 Things I Wish I Had Known in College, and the Stories of My 3 Lowest Points and Do You Have Impostor Syndrome?.)
I did not have a strong answer at the time either. But besides continuing the unpaid internship, applying for jobs, interviewing, and being rejected, I spent all my free time learning to code. I took many programming courses on Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy (for recent course recommendations, see the list my dear wife put together, Nine Months of Self-Study to Become a Software Engineer: The Online Resources I Used), and worked through many assignments. Every time I saw classmates from university or grad school, or other friends, find a job, or move to a better one, doing well at work, getting promoted and getting raises, relaxing and going out in the evenings and on weekends, I felt envious, and late at night I often doubted the road I had chosen. I graduated from grad school in May 2012. In June, my advisor paid me a little to run more experiments and get more data. But from July onward, it was not until April 2013, ten months later, that I got my first paid internship opportunity. About four months after that, in July 2013, I finally got the chance to convert to a full-time role. It took me one year and three months to get an entry-level full-time job in the US.
Treating a Crisis as a Chance to Rethink
I am writing this post today to offer you another way to think about things. Have you disliked your job, or your field of study, for a long time? Have you wanted to make a change for a while? Because of the pandemic, the world seems to have pressed pause. Many industries face a worrying outlook in the current situation, but the crisis has also surfaced needs that were never emphasized before.
Working remotely from home used to be a company perk. In an instant it has become the standard, and coordinating and communicating remotely matters more than ever. Traditional industries now need to go digital and do business online more urgently than ever before. Students and many unemployed people at home need to upskill, which raises the demand for online education. Many industries are being disrupted, and many are growing against the trend in this crisis. Just as the last financial crisis produced a batch of unicorn companies, this crisis, through new demand and the movement of talent, will surely produce a different landscape.
I was lucky to make my career change during the last recovery cycle. The overall industry trend was that demand for talent outstripped supply, which gave me the chance to enter the field and build up experience. If you have unfortunately been affected by the current pandemic, could you use this crisis to think about what you like and what you are good at, and prepare to switch toward the opportunities in the new trends ahead?
The title of this post is still “Never waste a good crisis.” Right now you may feel that the future is all darkness, with no light in sight. I wanted to share my long low point once again. Many people have suffered, or are suffering now, through low points of different lengths. Hardship is a normal part of life. What matters is how you seize the present and chart a life path that fits you better, so that ten years from now, looking back, you will be grateful for the turn this crisis brought you.
P.S. If you need a referral, the referral network I put together earlier with some friends can help refer you. Please see The Most Effective Way to Get an Interview: Internal Referrals and the Taiwanese Mutual-Help Network.
P.P.S. I am not hoping, or suggesting, that everyone should switch into software engineering. The world is big. Your strengths and skills may blossom in a different field. Finding the field or the new industry where you have passion and can shine is up to your own observation, thinking, and research.
This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on May 8, 2020. The blog is now offline, and the full text is preserved by the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.
