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What The Bubble Got Right
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written an article entitled What the Bubble Got Right. In recent years the roaring tech bubble has become a byword, yet Paul does an excellent job of articulating what it got right."
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Before the bubble burst, college kids would be getting 80+ grand/year. Right before I graduated **BOOM**.... good luck finding a job now...
"I think the Internet will have great effects, and that what we've seen so far is nothing compared to what's coming."
That's been my view all along, both during the boom and during the bust. We ain't seen nothing yet. When you create a means of communication such that almost anyone on the planet can interact with anyone else on the planet, great things will develop from it. We saw only the baby steps during the boom, and the bulk of what will develop is yet to come. But it is coming. People love to jump off fads and disavow them. That's especially tempting if you lost money in the process. But the idea of person-to-person direct communciation, and everyone-is-an-author concept, is no fad. People love to communicate, they love to express themselves, and the streamlining that the Net makes possible has, is, and will continue to make breakthroughs in the business world.
Just give it time and we'll see wonders yet unimagined.
The big question here is how you can possibly build customer loyalty if you outsource the business unit which is in charge of customer relationships. This doesn't sound like a wise idea to me.
Under construction: swpat politics overview article
What I was telling people back during the bubble turned out to be true. I basically said "If you think everybody is going to be shopping on the Internet, then don't invest in specific web sites; you'll never predict which ones are going to be profitable a few years from now. Instead, invest in the delivery companies (e.g. FedEx and UPS). No matter where or what people buy online, the delivery companies are going to be more profitable!" I think this is still good advice. From the fact that DHL is now getting into domestic delivery, apparently they think so too.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
OK...so he arrives in California around 1998 and determines that California is the next big thing for the next 50 years??? The next Chicago? Pleeeeeezee...
Where has this guy been?
California has been the next instant source of wealth since well before the gold rush! The bubble wasn't the first time silicon valley became the center of the universe - take a look at the first PC boom/bust of the 80's.
Sorry to be so provincial here, but being a California native I have a bone to pick about the characterization of California. Sure, we are all totally super nice out here and polite and all of that (um - yeah right) - but keep in mind, most of the people from here ARE transplants.
I'm a native of the Bay Area and have lived here all my life - I can count the number of people on maybe one hand who I know can say the same. So the attitude has little to do California or Silicon Valley.
I took a detour to New York for a year and a half in the mid-nineties. While I found that most New Yorkers did have a rough crusty exterior, once you get passed that they are as warm as anyone from CA. Not only that - but friendships (like startup ventures), have a tendency to be somewhat transitory in California. I found the opposite on the other coast.
That said I wouldn't live anywhere else - but to each their own.
Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy.
I have no patience with people who decided to become software engineers (or doctors or lawyers or golf ball polishers) because they thought/were told/read somewhere/had a divine revelation that "that's where the money is".
People who decide to go after work that they don't enjoy in order to make more money than they think they would at something that they enjoyed, are doomed to be miserable. They will be be miserable IN their job, they will be miserable AT their job, and they will make the people around them miserable, too.
Having a vendor certification/college degree/union card doesn't mean you will be happy at a job, and it doesn't mean you will be successful at one, either.
Find something you really enjoy doing, and then find someone willing to pay you to do it, and you will be happy.
And if you're happy, you won't need to bitch about how terrible the job market is, or how your "investment" in your certification/college degree/union card "is not paying off". A job is not something you can buy from a diploma store, or that you have a right to, having spent some requisite amount of money at one.
I've interviewed a lot of people for a lot of jobs, and I'll tell you right now: I don't hire or recommend hiring people if they don't enjoy doing what it is they are going to be doing on a daily basis as part of their job, and do it well. Other things matter too, but that's the A-number-one gating factor for me giving you a thumbs up.
For a software engineering job, if you weren't one of the people who hung out at the computer lab simply because you enjoyed being around the machines and other people who also enjoyed that, then I don't care that you received straight A's for the Visual C++ work you turned in from your home PC without ever interacting with another human being who was interested in the same type of thing, before you went to the frat party and drank yourself stupid.
Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.
You may or may not be a skater -- if you aren't, I'm sorry that you're so bad at selling yourself to prosective employers, or that you love doing something you aren't very good at; either figure out a way to address your shortcomings, or pick something *else* you like to do, and do that instead.
But if you are one of those people who picked their career based on a "top salaries" list, and then skated through college on the minimum possible effort to maintain a nice looking GPA, looking for the high paying job at the end of the rainbow, the world is probably better off if you are stuck asking those of us who didn't "Would you like fries with that?".
-- Terry
One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small. I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people. What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get. As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because the internal friction in a group grows as the square of its size.
I know from experience (non-trivial engineering projects} that more people does not necessarily equal more success; sometimes it drags down an effort while the original goal gets lost in "management".
Wow, that was a pretty crappy comment. What is always needed is a leader who knows what he's doing, not a cheerleader who has a vague idea of what's going on, and this applies to software as well as making widgets.
I'll trade 1000 "money-making" employees (after IPO) for 10 people that are focused on the goal.
Oh get a clue.
In the real world real people need money to do real things. Try fucking tell me that I don't need lots of money and I or anyone else should be happy working my arse off earning shit wages the next time their son/daughter/husband/wife needs an operation, or when you want to send kids to school. For that matter if you want to own/rent a decent home you can't go to your bank manager and tell him see I'm not a sell out and expect to get what you need in life. See what a difference $100k will make to a kid's education and then tell me to go do something I enjoy for $30k a year.
If you were doing it for fun and didn't care about making money at it, it'd be a hobby. I'm not saying you should go and do something you absolutely hate for an extra $10k/yr. But if you can make a decent living chances are it won't be fulfilling some passion. You might write business software instead of scientific software for example. Basically you do something RELATED to what you enjoy and realise that to some extent you're going to burn that something as a passion/hobby, because after doing it so many hours a day for so many years you might not be as passionate about it.
People who are only passionate about their work are just as bad as if not worse than those who have other interests outside of their work. They get obsessed with their craft and don't see the big picture, and when something goes wrong at work they have nothing else to keep them happy. That's a one way ticket to bad health, both medical and physical. That's the kind of person that gets suicidal when they leave their job.
The phrase "work-life balance" is one that's often paid only lip service when times are good, but it is absolutely crucial.
IMHO most recruiters, employers and HR departments are clueless. I don't know how many fools I've talked to that just go out to find a candidate that will meet some narrow limited criteria. (You know the kind that wants a candidate who's a fool that'll work 80-120 hour weeks and just happens to have experience with the same goddamn J2EE app server the customer is). The same recruiters wonder why these people act like arrogant asses. The ins and outs of a particular piece of technology can be learnt. Its much harder to break the habbit of being too narrow and focused an individual.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer