Covid-19 and The Not-So-Great Depression

Nearly half-way through the first month of lockdown and there's the sense of an adjustment sinking in. Supermarket shelves are still a tad sparse but don't have the empty apocalypse-movie feel of past weeks. And despite lockdown being extended there's talk of peaks in infection being reached and noise about confirming a relaxing of isolation rules and a return to normalcy.

A lot's been written about the pandemic and its mismanagement. There's dire forecasts about the economy and predictions the virus will act as a driver for tech adoption. The shadow that Covid casts is as much financial as it is health-related. The virus strikes at 2 things most of us consider fundamental to wellbeing  - financial security and social connectedness.

IT and IT services has a certain worldwide industry mono-culture. But often, particularly for the global implementations, your team-mates can come from all over the world and I've been lucky to work with people from many different cultures, particularly Indians. Work is always work during office hours but its during off-moments that some welcome local cultural differences can shine - For a lot of people coming from food cultures lunch is something to be savoured as a shared experience where the entire team will make time to sit together.

This age-old, very human activity helps to bond people together - clearly a strength. But this very need for closeness is something the virus, like any transmittable vector for disease, exploits and so changes like remote-working have been introduced.

Remote working joys

Working in an office has obvious benefits. But there are downsides - the commute, office building problems, social distractions and of course breathing other peoples air etc. For a lot of IT or knowledge industry professionals remote working is easy as there's little physical about the products we build or create.

For myself, I've never felt healthier. Partly due to less commuting but also, curiously, because I've had less allergy-related sinus problems. This lasts most likely down to less environmental irritants tickling my snozz. That said, given the trade-off of working remotely vs avoiding the current crisis it's a no-brainer that I'd be happy with some sinus irritation if it meant there were no lives lost to the virus and things were back to normal.

Contracting blues

I've definitely seen disruption in the contracting market since the beginning of the year - multiple opportunities were pulled, usually due to the related Salesforce-related transformation project being paused over February and March particularly in heavily-impacted industry sectors.

However, going into April there seems to be some stability emerging. Whilst there are less opportunities overall there's some level of confidence returning due to positive noises from government and an awareness that inflight projects shouldn't slip if possible so hopefully the contracting market will continue to pickup.

In the meantime and as an assignment recently ended, I'll use the time available to take my SF Admin cert again (have missed the Trailhead maintenance last year, doh!), refresh my coding skills and study for further SF certs over the rest of April during the job search.

The Great Lockdown, The Great Depression 2.0 or The Great Stress Test?

The direct human cost of the virus will be immense, particularly in the developing world drawing comparisons to the Spanish Flu of 1918. The indirect human cost, lost jobs and business impacts, will also be significant with comparisons being made to the Great Depression.

However, Spanish Flu has estimates of 100 million related deaths worldwide which clearly Covid-19 will not reach (pending some awful mutation of the virus) in no small part due to preventive measures being taken relatively early. And whilst the extent of the global financial contraction will be similar to the Great Depression the underlying causes aren't - there's no equivalent of the run on gold (though the oil price war has some similarities) and there isn't systemic crises with banking or national economies. So from that perspective we've been unfortunate and there's a positive side to the current challenge.

That said Covid-19 has highlighted the lack of resiliency in industry, finance and government structures - shocking considering it's just a few months disruption and in light of the fact that governments seemed to be aware there was a strong likelihood of a pandemic over this decade. Where there's disruption, there's opportunities and there'll be titans created in the next few months.

One thing stands out for me - every 10 years there's a downturn as boom inevitably leads to bust. The credit crunch happened in 2009 and sure enough around 10 years later we're facing another, even worse, contraction. This time caused by Mother Nature rather than human incompetence. And just like the credit crunch governments, organisations, firms and individuals are being stress tested. Hopefully this time round we'll come out stronger and smarter than we did then. If not, history does really seem to have a tendency to repeat and we'll be going through the same, if not worse, in another 10 years.