All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

I heard people say this a thousand times in 1999. I doubt it's any more true now than it was then.

The price of butter is the price of butter. If one hypothetically thinks butter is too expensive, sell butter, don't buy butter. (i.e. offer your services as an engineer rather than trying to hire engineers.) It think it is highly unlikely that anything happening in the capital markets, positive or negative, will make cause engineering (and related trades) to re-transition to the days where you could e.g. find perfectly adequate programmers for $40k. (P.S. Not to slight anybody making that, as I was at $30k like two years ago. Get a wee bit more sophisticated about who you work for and what you work on. You'll do better monetarily and quite possibly have more fun.)

There exist repeatable ways to scalably build product businesses with millions of dollars of actual revenue out of a few man months of work. Unless that economic reality goes away, engineers (&etc) will continue to be cheap at essentially any price.

This is great news for everyone selling talent here. Is it bad news for those buying talent? Meh. If you could pick any time in the history of the world to start a software business, it would probably be now, because the markets are bigger than ever, the distribution channels are fantastic, the SaaS billing model allows us to 10x prices without business customers perceiving any increased difficulty to justify the purchase, the non-human capital costs associated with a software business are asymptotically approaching zero, etc etc.

Say it turns out that in a year or two Facebook settles onto a good solid advertising system that makes sense to advertisers. Revenues to a sustainable $5b and keeps up a nice sweet margin of 25%-30%. Expected growth is 10% for the next few years as advertisers figure out how to use it (in my opinion this was the driver of Google's growth post IPO). That's a genuine whale. As a startup story it's massive economic success in a short period of time. Even this (hypothetical) post IPO year or two seem (to me) like a success story.

But.. investors (at the present stage) are betting (according to the price) on much better results than that. 5X-10X better at least to call the investment good.

I'm not saying this will happen (I dunno). I'm asking what if*. Basically the company which didn't exist a few years ago is now a huge (& good) company. Easily worth $20bn, maybe more. But investors are losing money. How bad is that? Does the company fall apart. Is the danger bad enough for managers risk everything over & over to avoid it?

^ I'm going on media reports of Mrkt Cap/Rev/Profit of $100bn/$3.7b/$1b

Then the Google hiring process is probably biased to false negatives. So applying at Google is somewhat like a scratch-off lottery, unless you have something going for you that makes you stand out.

This makes me think that networking by "doing stuff with people" is a much more effective strategy, especially if you think there's something about your CV which could be a red flagged in a system biased to false negatives.