michael_nielsen

I wish to emphasize that this is one of those "Difficult to appreciate from the outside, extraordinarily obvious from the inside" facts about the tech industry.https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1087590716887334913 …

A company growing at ~2X per year will, in year N+5, hire more people than worked at the company in year N in *every biweekly hiring class.* Mentally think of software companies you were aware of in 2013 and how big they were. If they haven't fallen off the curve, welp.

AppAmaGooBookSoft probably don't 2X every year but there are units in them which laugh in the general direction of that, and let's say that the rest of the software industry also has lots of projects they'd like to staff.

"Is this growth sustainable?" I mean, in the narrow sense of "Can anything 2X per year over 100 years", probably no. In the sense of "Should I expect reversion to the mean in software employment?", I would bet against that.

Considered over the arc of recorded history we're careening at breakneck speeds through a growth curve for "number of people employed who are literate" and "percentage of workforce which materially uses literacy to perform job functions", but that doesn't mean "literacy bubble."

As sidenote, have had conversations before about whether we are in a literacy bubble and what that would mean haha