|
|
|
|
|
|
by jerf
3886 days ago
|
|
|
"If software is the new oil, be prepared for a wild ride. The oil industry is notorious for decade-scale cycles of over-hiring and then layoffs and under-hiring, rinse-lather-repeat." We've already been through one. We may be on the high side of another right now. I think the mechanisms are sufficiently different from the oil world that comparisons aren't too helpful, though; the presence of some form of negative feedback in the system is often sufficient to produce oscillations. The negative feedbacks are quite different in character even if the results are the same at a sufficiently high level of abstraction. (I'm not sure that we're in a "bubble" in the 1999 sense that people worry about, but still, if the economy ever becomes healthy again and interest rates go up, software will cease to be the only investment people can make that has any chance of paying of, which will mean that even without a "collapse" the investor money flows may dry up relative to today. However, I think the industry has a greater focus on real profits today, which will buffer the industry substantially vs. 1999. Yeah, we talk about the hyper-growth eyeball-selling companies, but we talk about they partially because they are the exception; there's a lot more "real value" companies out there right now.) |
|
|
The access to cheap money has brought in a lot of players into the market who otherwise would have been sidelined. I think it's not only evident in the startup/unicorn sector but quite so in the building/construction sector as well. I see all around me skyscrapers & apartment complexes being built in an unprecedented rate and people buying half a million dollar+ houses where quarter of a million was too high (as you can see I'm not in Cal).