The Human Capital Bubble | Hacker News Reader

The Human Capital Bubble

finance.yahoo.com

15 pointskqr27 comments

This article speaks to supply and demand as it relates to poor interpretations of the market signals. An interesting read for Entrepreneurs.

Remember when the key metric was "hits" for websites? I remember a client saying he wanted to maximize hits and I told him that we could slice up some big gifs into smaller gifs and that would make the hit count go up. I was trying to illustrate the inadequacy of hits as a metric but that just made his eyes lights up with the idea that he could artificially pump up the number of hits his company's site was getting.

One consequence here is that as fewer smart people will go into finance some of them will go into software engineering, driving down wages for junior developers. Bad news if you are a junior developers, good job if you are a manager (or plan to become one soon).

Another consequence of the current economic situation is a redistribution of business/entrepreneurial talent from the finance sector. This will naturally create more jobs in other sections of the economy, including technology.

The pressure on labor you're thinking about is true, of course, but the jobs market isn't a zero-sum game. Creative talent can increase the economic benefit for everyone, even as others stream in for their piece of the pie.

For example, aside from the dozen or more web companies I know who'd love to be hiring programmers and expanding their business, there's also me, a lowly moonlighter. Were I able to hire and build my business to the point of profitability in the near term (I've yet to launch), I'd be able to hire still more developers to further the business and so on.

Which all goes to say that there's not a fixed supply of jobs we're fighting for. We're working towards value, and value has a way of building on itself. If the software industry can create more value with those incremental workers, then the migration is good for us all.

I'm not sure how relevant this article is to HN; not that in the sense that it shouldn't have been posted, but it's focused squarely on human capital as it relates to Wall Street. A perfectly fine approach, and relevant for Yahoo Finance, but it doesn't have much to do with tech. I suspect that what speaks to those who were wooed directly into investment banks following college isn't the same impetus that drives 'rock star' developers. Or regular developers who love what they do.

On-Topic:...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Not everything on HN needs to 'have much to do with tech.'

Long after the point, but I explicitly stated, ".. not in that it shouldn't have been posted, .." The line 'having much to do with tech' was also referring to the human capital he was talking about, decidedly _not_ the article itself. I agree with the premise of the article, and agree that the signals being missed are germane to all entrepreneurs and businessmen, but I expressly meant that it isn't as if in the reshuffling of human capital we'd see another massive influx into the technology sector as in the first dot com bubble. That's what I was talking about, not suggesting HN turn into Digg. Apologies if the first line was misleading.

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