reaching peak people

San Francisco, Silicon Valley, DC, Baltimore, Chicago. I've hit most of these cities multiple times this year and one thing has started to stand out clearly: there's a talent constraint.

It stood out most at VMworld last month + Surge this month. Then I read this: 

Are we reaching “peak people”?

It seems like in a lot of companies we are. There’s a shortage of talent out there, and if there’s a shortage of resources, you want to conserve those resources.

That's Jason Fried of 37signals. I've been talking to technology companies, enterprises, startups, state agencies, federal agencies, defense organizations and this is becoming a recurring refrain. "How do we move the organization forward? What kind of people do we need? Where do we get them?" That's not even what I cover or talk about, yet the question keeps coming up.

I don't think it's a fundamental technology skill supply problem, though. I think it's an allocation problem. Too much money is chasing too few problems spread out over too many organizations all employing the same kinds of people to do the same kinds of things. And that's how it'll stay--until things move on + the field is decimated.

Peak people.

P.S. I do think there's a supply problem for a particular skillset: systems people who understand applications + vice-versa. But that has most (in my opinion) to do with the fact that the kind of education that takes seems to have dropped off the general computer science curriculum.