roy

It's official in my mind: We are officially living in the second .com bubble. I was so bummed out I missed the first rush, but now I'm glad I did. The first bubble, in retrospect, was far more about making a few clueless people rich than adding any real value to users.

Of course, I'm more on the "engineering" end, so the reason why this bubble kicks ass for me is the relative quantity of jobs available to me.

Although there are plenty of fluff companies out there, and the majority of them will fail, I'm excited to see all these hot new companies come out who try to make life easier for all of us.

Caterina (of Flickr fame!) writes in "It's a bad time to start a company": "Talent is scarce again. Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP for Wench.com and I can't find anyone (Hey if you are a PHP webapp builder and have some spare cycles, email me at caterina-at-gmail). Everyone's gainfully employed, and fielding several offers.". Ben Barren echoes the sentiment: "Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP.." - We really need someone to do some little PHP and design 'implementation' work and it's totally hard again in Melbourne too. There are 232 PHP jobs advertised on seek.com.au alone.".

I fire up my RSS aggregator, and what do I see? GeekNews owner Todd Cochrane is looking for standards-compliant web developer for his new start-up company.

I was informed today that the company I work for is looking for another XHTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP developer (but not to much avail), and Jackson's been telling me at the Blogger meetups that Lulu is also looking for some developers.

I check out Craigslist from time to time, and there's always nearly always a job posted daily that I qualify for just in the Raleigh area ...

Even now, I'm working on a freelance project for a friend of mine (whose family wants to develop a rudimentary e-commerce site for their family business online).... it is almost nearly enough that if I were to get terminated from my job (let's hope not, I love it!) I could probably pick up where I left off just on freelancing. It does make me feel a bit more secure in my job, although I can just imagine five years from now when this bubble bursts, how unprepared I'll be for joblessness.

Although, I guess I'll probably be burned out then, so it really won't matter...