

The healthy future of the web industry maybe short-lived - gavinelliott
http://www.gavinelliott.co.uk/2011/07/the-healthy-future-of-the-web-industry-maybe-short-lived/

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mechanical_fish
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_.

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PaulHoule
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.

~~~
tatsuke95
>"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.

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justincormack
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.

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chadp
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.)

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quanticle
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.

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zinssmeister
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.

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tatsuke95
>"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.

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Synthetase
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.

~~~
tatsuke95
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.

