I suspect quarantines and restrictions will last at least 3 months and will extend for longer based upon the state of spread and hospital volume. The current evidence from the medical experts suspects the pandemic will last about 18 months.
While health and social restrictions are serious immediate concerns the state of the economy will ultimately be more seriously harmed. Consider that industries like restaurants, events, movies, education, and so forth are basically shut down. The transportation industry is operating on minimal life support and oil prices are nearing negative prices. That is a lot of people out of work. Our economy is primarily based on consumer shopping and right now nobody is shopping for consumer goods, which means many other businesses will fail and many more people will be out of work. There are already many developers who are losing their jobs.
Things will be tough for a while. I suspect the economy will recover slowly as this will likely be far worse than 2008. Even with the various economic stimulus packages released by the government we are nearing depression conditions. If you hadn't made precautions for this 2 months ago you will be feeling some disruptions.
The reason why I think this will be substantially worse than 2008 is that 2008 was, for the most part, a loss of wealth. Then there was an oil spike that caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, especially in transportation, that rippled through to other industries. Unemployment spiked to double digits but it didn't happen quickly and it did not have a huge overall impact. The largest impact is that many wealthy people lost a large amount of investment wealth and many poor people lost homes they should have never qualified for in the first place.
In contrast this time a greater diversity of industries will be economically killed very quickly. The warning signs were there months ago, but nobody was listening. When looking at the market you can see that investment markets spiked to high values the first week of January and then entered high volatility (uncertainty) for the rest of January only to start sliding through February. February 20 was the cliff when the markets starting falling apart and now about a month after that wide swaths of jobs are being eliminated across the board.
I don't suspect there will be extreme panic, marshall law, or zombie apocalypse. The government has deemed certain industries as critical to national security such as certain segments of finance, utilities, grocery and food distribution industries, transportation and so forth. If necessary the government will fund those industries to keep people employed and keep services alive. There is talk of wide-scale credit forgiveness to to slow people from losing personal assets. So long as the medical industry is not overwhelmed most of daily life to continue to function normally even though many people will be destitute.
I do suspect a lot of business practices will change moving forward. Costly industries that had the luxury of no regulation or oversight, such as software, will likely be redefined to better maximize return on investment. I think employers that are struggling to keep the lights on will significantly scale back (or eliminate) marketing spend and will be trying to hire fewer developers to accomplish more things. The rare and legendary 10x developer may likely become the norm provided appropriate adjustments to business practices and elimination of personnel/productivity barriers. If you are a software developer and not a fabled 10x developer I would recommend using this time to write open source software, study, and diversify your skill sets.
While health and social restrictions are serious immediate concerns the state of the economy will ultimately be more seriously harmed. Consider that industries like restaurants, events, movies, education, and so forth are basically shut down. The transportation industry is operating on minimal life support and oil prices are nearing negative prices. That is a lot of people out of work. Our economy is primarily based on consumer shopping and right now nobody is shopping for consumer goods, which means many other businesses will fail and many more people will be out of work. There are already many developers who are losing their jobs.
Things will be tough for a while. I suspect the economy will recover slowly as this will likely be far worse than 2008. Even with the various economic stimulus packages released by the government we are nearing depression conditions. If you hadn't made precautions for this 2 months ago you will be feeling some disruptions.
The reason why I think this will be substantially worse than 2008 is that 2008 was, for the most part, a loss of wealth. Then there was an oil spike that caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, especially in transportation, that rippled through to other industries. Unemployment spiked to double digits but it didn't happen quickly and it did not have a huge overall impact. The largest impact is that many wealthy people lost a large amount of investment wealth and many poor people lost homes they should have never qualified for in the first place.
In contrast this time a greater diversity of industries will be economically killed very quickly. The warning signs were there months ago, but nobody was listening. When looking at the market you can see that investment markets spiked to high values the first week of January and then entered high volatility (uncertainty) for the rest of January only to start sliding through February. February 20 was the cliff when the markets starting falling apart and now about a month after that wide swaths of jobs are being eliminated across the board.
I don't suspect there will be extreme panic, marshall law, or zombie apocalypse. The government has deemed certain industries as critical to national security such as certain segments of finance, utilities, grocery and food distribution industries, transportation and so forth. If necessary the government will fund those industries to keep people employed and keep services alive. There is talk of wide-scale credit forgiveness to to slow people from losing personal assets. So long as the medical industry is not overwhelmed most of daily life to continue to function normally even though many people will be destitute.
I do suspect a lot of business practices will change moving forward. Costly industries that had the luxury of no regulation or oversight, such as software, will likely be redefined to better maximize return on investment. I think employers that are struggling to keep the lights on will significantly scale back (or eliminate) marketing spend and will be trying to hire fewer developers to accomplish more things. The rare and legendary 10x developer may likely become the norm provided appropriate adjustments to business practices and elimination of personnel/productivity barriers. If you are a software developer and not a fabled 10x developer I would recommend using this time to write open source software, study, and diversify your skill sets.