Thread by @patio11

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/AustenAllred/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."

Consumption of technology skill in productive labor will likely increase over time, and skill levels which would have predicted "highly-skilled specialist" a relatively short time ago will be broadly available in working population. (There will still be specialists at frontier.)

Remember in living memory that people were given year-long classes to use MS Word. Most did not graduate these classes with meaningful proficiency.

McDonalds used to train people to operate registers, for weeks.

In 2018 McDonalds can expect *customers* to use POS w/in seconds.