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by smokinn 5648 days ago
Sort of.

The problem with calling everything a bubble is the implication that bubbles inevitably pop.

In our industry, good programmers tend to create a vastly disproportionate amount of value compared to what they're paid. It's easy to pay programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars because with programmers, a few thousands of dollars of computers and some electricity you can make millions.

Maybe it's a bubble but I think it's simply a market correction. If your output is valuable you can and should be compensated well for it.
2 comments
nir 5648 days ago
Well, bubbles do pop. The market was hot 96-2000, then cold say 2001-2005, then got hot till the mortgage crisis, then cold until a few months ago etc.

Great programmers can create a lot of value, in the right context. Boo.com ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com ) might have had developers as bright as Amazon's, working just as hard - but in the end they created $0 value.

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smokinn 5648 days ago
It's obviously not a given that you get programmers together and they create value. There's a lot more to a business than coding.

What I was arguing is not that bubbles don't pop but rather that you can't call everything a bubble because that implies that it's going to go down.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer myself and therefore I'm too biased but I see very few jobs right now that are in such high demand and whose demand is only going to rise even more in the near term.

Basically I was saying it's not a bubble, it's a normal market correction. We had the dot-com bust that devalued programmers massively because of completely artificial conditions and this "white hot" we're currently in really should be the norm.

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petercooper 5648 days ago
As an aside, (and apologies if you've read it) "Boo Hoo", the corporate biography of Boo.com's rise and fall, makes for both hilarious and scary reading: http://www.amazon.com/Boo-Hoo-Dot-Com-Story/dp/0099418371

Their technical people did pull off some great feats but ultimately it was a shambles from start to finish.

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nir 5648 days ago
Nice! I wasn't aware of this book, will add it to my list.
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jdp23 5648 days ago
Maybe it is a bubble and maybe it isn't. We shall see. But this kind of white-hotness occurred in past bubbles, so it's one more indication that's what going on.

And yes, bubbles pop.

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