Valley Talent

>For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram?

Hm. It sounds like you don't know what CRUD means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete

bitcoin doesn't belong on that list, as the primary thing about bitcoin is the database, not the interface.

You could certainly call pinterest, facebook, mint and instagram CRUD apps at their core, though obviously, the CRUD nature is not what makes them special or interesting; but yes, the core facebook app Creates, Reads, Updates (though maybe doesn't delete) from a database; same with twitter and facebook and mint (though, of course, the technically hard part of facebook is getting the equivalent of a tremendously massive join to scale, not writing an app to display the data. Not figuring that problem out, I'm given to understand, is what killed friendster)

Of course, all of those apps, well, it's more about marketing than about the technical stuff. You have to come up with something people want, and coming up with something people want is a very different thing from solving technical problems. Now, of course, if it doesn't work nobody is gonna want it, so you have to have a minimum level of technical competency for your scale; friendster showed that.

But the truth of the matter is that 95% of what you build is stuff that nobody is going to want. And there is no way of knowing ahead of time if you are working on that 95% or on the 5%; So most people build version one cheap. They cut corners. They take on technical debt. Because they only need to build it to work long enough to make it obvious that it's something people want. After it is shown that this is a thing people might actually like, you can dump a bunch of money into rewriting it properly and/or propping up the crap you have.

I mean... look at how much effort facebook has put into... PHP.

The danger here, of course, is demonstrated by friendster. If you have enough interest to make your cheap demo fall over, you need to move fast in propping the goddamn thing up and then hiring some real engineers to build something that can actually scale.

I've seen an alternate anecdote developing, one in which talent is growing weary of delivery, social, and data startups. It appears to result from both a financially stable base (engineers having made money from prev mentioned startups) and a desire to have a larger impact.

Additionally, something I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, but the API availability is unfathomably vast now. I was checking out Google's developer console and there are over 100 incredibly robust APIs just a GET request away. In the real world, you can order drone images, turn off your lights at home, monitor your health levels all from url endpoints. These computational implementations are encouraging talent to work on projects that are beyond the scope of a laptop and a dorm room.

I for one am optimistic in Valley Talent, and can't wait for the next few years.

Knowledge nurses talent, but it is not in and of itself knowledge. The knowledge of how to solve a problem that has been solved before is incredibly useful, but the real talent in our industry is the talent to solve new problems in new ways, and most people develop that talent but not just looking at how a problem was solved but deconstructing the process of how the designer of that solution came to the conclusion they did.

To paraphrase...

Because good coders borrow, but great coders steal.

Randall, I have a suggestion for your site: add the article title as the HTML title, so the tab shows up as "Valley Talent" instead of "Randall Koutnik."