The healthy future of the web industry maybe short-lived | Hacker News Reader

The healthy future of the web industry maybe short-lived

gavinelliott.co.uk

28 pointsgavinelliott10 comments

It's important to separate out the long-term trend from the business cycle. This business-cycle surge (which some call "the bubble") will crash, and then we'll see a rather different series of articles moaning that the web industry was overhyped and there's all these folks around who only know how to build Facebook Poking apps but can't find work, in the future we'll only need 17 Facebook programmers and they'll all live in some faraway country where the rent is cheap, blah blah blah, I have lived through this movie before.

Behind all this sturm und drang is a very real growth in the need for web talent, and I agree with the article that the training system for talented people is broken-to-nonexistent. But the industry is healthy and will probably remain so for the foreseeable decades. (Though, as usual, the industry will evolve and all the tools, skillsets, and job descriptions will look different in ten years.) It's just that superimposed on the healthy industry is a cycle of unhealthy-looking talent shortages alternating with unhealthy-looking talent gluts. You can always make the picture look more risky, frenetic, and unsustainable than it is if you focus on the movements of the fashionable froth that forms on the top of the industry ocean. Fashion is that way by design.

Right now I think we're in a "permanent bubble" economy.

The underlying problem is that the financial sector (and financial assets) have grown more than the rest of the economy, and there is too much capital in existence to be productively invested. When an area becomes fashionable, so much "hot money" shows up so quickly that bubbles get blown. The economy becomes the sum total of the active bubbles.

If you could just buy shares in a boring mutual fund or hedge fund and believe that they're going to go up 13% a year, fewer people would be interested in being angel investors or buying silver or whatever.

One characteristic of postmodern bubbles, compared to the old ones, is that the question "is this a bubble?" gets asked on day 1.

As far as long term prospects, many people involved in the .com age didn't experience the .com bust as a career destroying trauma -- it was actually a blip in the long term growth of the web industry.

The web industry still has another factor of 2 or 3 left in growth, maybe a little more -- but the thing that's different now is that the web industry is finally large enough to steal the lunch of legacy competitors. Retail, newspapers, television and many other industries are feeling the impact.

>"If you could just buy shares in a boring mutual fund or hedge fund and believe that they're going to go up 13% a year, fewer people would be interested in being angel investors or buying silver or whatever."

But the mutual fund still has to stick that money somewhere, and they go along with the bubble just like everyone else.

>"One characteristic of postmodern bubbles, compared to the old ones, is that the question "is this a bubble?" gets asked on day 1."

I like this. And, if people are constantly worried about bubbles, irrational exuberance can be avoided...or at least balanced.

I dont know. I see a lot of people trying to hire exactly the same people, a lack of willingness to invest in cross training or any training at all, as people just want so called rockstars. And a large number of people not building sustainable businesses that could support training and learning because they are just chasing a bubble.

The recruitment industry is also in the way of better solutions.

Seek and source talent globally. Look outside your own borders. Just because the USA or UK is short of web skills, it doesn't mean the sky is falling down for the whole industry. China, India, Russia, E. Europe, SE Asia are some places to start looking. (it is getting harder in those places too but MUCH MUCH easier than the "western" countries.)

The problem with looking outside the US, in East and South Asia particularly, is numbers. Yes, there are many more talented developers over there. However, there are even more untalented developers. You'll have to put a lot more work into filtering and developing an absolutely solid recruiting process.

Then, there's the fact that cultural and language barriers still exist, despite American English being the lingua franca of the web. Even something like timezones can be a hardship when the person you're working with is offset by eleven or twelve hours.

That's not to say that outsourcing is a bad solution. It's just not the low-cost, high-skill panacea like everyone makes it out to be. Like any other form of recruiting, you have to really work at it if you're going to be successful.

There is no "bubble" when it comes to the talent shortage. We are short on talent because developers are needed EVERYWHERE.

Consumers are using technology on a scale never seen before. Our lives went from ONLINE to ONLINE ALL THE TIME. Every company in every industry has to hire web people, every agency needs a go-to web guy and the web industry itself is growing into every aspect of our lives: Entertainment (Netflix, Zynga), Mobile, Communication, Transportation, etc.

The amount of projects developers and designers have to maintain and build from scratch is incredible. Back in the day we had computers on the web. Now we TV's, phones, tablets, cars and even a Samsung fridge connected to the web. Building all this stuff takes talent... lots of it. And the best part about it, consumers want this.

>"Consumers are using technology on a scale never seen before. Our lives went from ONLINE to ONLINE ALL THE TIME. "

I see your point, but this is a hair too close to the "this time it's different" argument. The fact is, we're ALWAYS using technology at an increasing rate. The name and industries change, but the game doesn't.

The web as we know it will come and go. The jobs will shift from skilled to low skilled, and the industry will become far more capital intensive. Remember, at one point in time, the ability to use a computer was a highly sought after skill.

I find myself agreeing with his sentiment.

When the cost of doing business grows intolerably large, in this case the acquisition of talent, growth slows and reverses. This is one of the classical reasons for boom bust cycles.

And I tend to agree with this.

Being involved in "the biz", I look around sometimes and can't comprehend how something like this could ever slow down, let alone decline. Then the rational, economics side of me expresses a reminder that while the name of the industry may be different, we've seen stories like this many times in recent history. This cycle will ebb too. Just have to milk it.

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