Tech Bubble

>>981369
I wish I better understood the fundamentals of the market because it certainly looks like it.

>>981369
depends on innovation

>>981374
I know nothing about the market and have yet to even take my first Econ class but the current climate does not seem sustainable.
Grads making 130k in Bay area start ups just doesn't seem capable of being maintained.

Not even close, companies were doubling their stock price by putting an i or e infront of their name. The environment is nothing like that now

>>981369
>getting into the UW's CS department
lolno

They turn down people with 4.0 GPA's, so even if you do absolutely perfect your first two years of bullshit weeder classes, you still have no guarantee of getting in. Just say no to the UW: it's not worth two years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars just to get turned away from your major.

I think they accepted something like eight percent of CS applicants last year?

>>981387
Informatics major actually. I'm in state and job prospects coming out of the business school are wonderful as well. Planning on grad school regardless.

>>981401
It's still very competitive. I would strongly advise you to go to a different school even if it's "worse." Keep in mind that the UW is only "good" because they turn away most of their student population and only keep the people who manage to outcompete their classmates. By going there you're choosing to participate in their academic hunger games.

>>981404
I share animosity towards University of Washington as well, but I'm already here and the rest of our state schools aren't top notch by any means. 3.5 is manageable, and I will ensure I'm competitive. Nonetheless, I'm open to transferring if need be.

>>981380
>Grads making 130k in Bay area start ups just doesn't seem capable of being maintained.

Chicken or egg problem. 130K starting salary for an in-demand skill makes sense when your annual rent is something like 60K a year. Is tech a bubble, or is it the localized Bay area housing a bubble? You don't see tech companies in other parts of the U.S (except for NY) paying that much out. But arguably the talent goes to SF because of the network bubble so there's that issue and that feeds into the housing problem and pay problem.

I don't think there's a bubble, sure there's more money flowing into tech VC (now that corporate funds and institution investors want some action), but I don't think you can call that a bubble – it's just hard for them to find good returns at the moment elsewhere so they're trying their hand at tech VC which will leave a lot of them burned, a bunch of shitty companies will crash, but it will be heavily isolated to this new "tech world" of shitty SaaS companies and shitty service companies that serve those working for SaaS startups.

>>981405
WSU is actually pretty nice, despite what people say about it. In my opinion the teaching, campus, and student atmosphere are all much, much better than the UW. I did my first two years at the UW and then transferred after they only took 12% of mechanical engineering applicants.

There's a lot of annoying little things about the UW that you wouldn't expect based on their reputation. For one, it's completely overrun with foreign Chinese students to the point where about half the student population is from China. They're ridiculously nationalistic to the point of standing up and shouting at the professor in the middle of lecture for mentioning Taiwan (yes, that happened), they smoke everywhere, and they don't interact with the non-Chinese students, among other things.

There was a good Vanity Fair article on this. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/is-silicon-valley-in-another-bubble

You've got companies like twitter valued at billions of dollars that have not once made a profit in the 10 years since they launched. People just pour money into these things but you can only make so much money selling targeted advertisements. When's the last time you purchased something because it appeared on your facebook news feed? A lot of people just block them anyway. And then they've got to try and strike a balance between profit and how much users are willing to tolerate before they go elsewhere or begin to block it

>>981411
My big issue with WSU was location, and most of their grads seemed to stick around whereas I wanted the option to use my education across the globe. Outside of that, I find the administration/atmosphere/etc to be far more of something I'd enjoy. Fathers friend was in similar boat, and ended up transferring to Stanford.

Agreed about the many little annoying things. ESPECIALLY the international students. My dad graduated in the 80's from UW and encouraged me to join the greek system after witnessing how overfilled with international students the dorms had become.

In short, I'm only here to get a good job after college, I have a strong disdain for this place otherwise.

Did you transfer to WSU? How was the shift?

Idk about a tech bubble, but there's probably some bubble brewing.

If I had the money to be invested in the markets I'd probably be pulling out now.

>>981415
This is what concerns me. How can this possibly economically be maintained? Somethings gotta give... or maybe I'm merely oblivious to the reality of the situation

>>981422
The issue is that companies like Twitter are creating value, but it's hard to figure out how to monetize that value. The rules have completely changed and the valuations both reflect that the value is there but its just not tapped yet (still experimenting with business models), and that there is some hype because it's new (this will disappear pretty soon).

there are a lot of bubbles that will have to burst sometime but it won't affect your career much, it will just mean there aren't as many opportunities to hustle

>>981422

I know a PA for a guy whose job is to help tech startups raise capital and sell for a maximum return. She told me about some of the ones he's working on at the moment - small businesses with a few dozen employees, a modest turnover, not much of a profit if any at all, and valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a bubble and it's going to burst, the question is when.

>>981438
what kind of investors? are major banks pouring people's pension funds into them

>>981423
>still experimenting with business models
If your company employs some of the brightest graduates in America and has extremely successful investors worth billions of dollars backing you and you still have not found a profitable business model in 10 years you're probably never going to find one

>>981442

They didn't say, but I'd assume hedge funds and angel investors, not institutional. People's pension funds have been poured into companies like Twitter, Netflix and Amazon though, and they'll tank when the bubble bursts too.

The last tech bubble happened because there were too many toys and not enough tools. Too many businesses built websites, and the majority of the websites were based off of fun/gimmicky business models.

It wasn't self sustaining.

The current tech "bubble" is propped up by much stronger and more sustainable technologies. Cloud and other storage and networking technologies; web design templates; business/operational intelligence; logistics; security.

Very few businesses are modeled around fun/gimmicky products (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat some obvious exceptions)

The "bubble" at risk is the hyperinflated cost of living in communities where so many of these sustainable technologies are headquartered.

The Bay Area has annual housing costs that are 30% larger than the national median income. Los Angeles, Seattle and even Portland aren't far behind.

Typically, when a community experiences a significant boost in fundamental/foundational business, service businesses spring up around the boom to exploit the new found prosperity. North Dakota finds more oil, more restaurants and daycares open up in North Dakota. Utah secures a massive government data center contract, more restaurants and daycares open up around the data center.

But while housing costs increase in these regions, they only increase in ways that are commensurate with the salaries - which, in turn, are commensurate with the cost of goods and services provided by the fundamental/foundational industry.

In the Bay Area, LA, New York, and even Boston, Seattle, Portland, Houston, you have housing costs and salaries for basic day to day positions - developers, sales, implementation, support - that dwarf comparable salaries for comparable valuations in other non-tech-booming communities.

This forces small businesses to raise prices for basic goods and services in those communities, just to survive. Or simply close.

And without amenities (food, daycare, etc), why live and work there?

>>981455
To put it more simply, tech isn't a bubble that will burst. The cities of San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are exploitative housing markets that will burst.

>>981455
>and even Boston
Yes fucking please, our bubble isn't the worst but it's one of the largest because it's so old. A shitty broken down house an hour away from Boston is 300k far too commonly.

There's def a startup bubble. All of these huge valuations of new companies that has yet to even make a profit. Especially in the BIoTech and Alt Energy sectors.

>>981466
I moved from Portland to Vancouver WA about 2 years ago and haven't looked back.

Better schools, better roads, more quality homes at a cheaper price, lower crime, fewer homeless people. Oh, and you could get your booze at the grocery store and weed across the street at the weed store, if that's your thing. No income tax was the straw that broke the camels back.

The first year or so I lived in Portland I was telecommuting 4 days a week for an employer in Beaverton. Once I filed taxes and saw how much money I was saving by not throwing it away at a bloated, fractured, overpriced and relatively useless state government, I was ecstatic.

I set about looking for a better job with an in-state employer.

This was much easier than it would have been 10 years ago, due to the flight of businesses out of Oregon and into Washington.

Portland and it's relationship with Vancouver is interesting. The Portland metro area has set itself up to compliment neighboring cities. Public transportation, roads and businesses all blur the lines between Portland proper, and neighboring Oregon cities like Beaverton, Hillsboro, Clackamas, Gresham, Milwaukee and even Troutdale.

But Portland has just two bridges connecting Vancouver Washington to the metro area, with just 4 bus lines and no trains connecting the cities.

So Vancouver has asserted itself as a self sufficient community. Sure, some residents drive to Portland to work, some residents commute from Portland to Vancouver. But the numbers pale in comparison to the Oregon-to-Oregon traffic.

For a long time, employers yearned to escape the high taxes and rampant homelessness that jeopardized their business, but to move to Vancouver meant risking a smaller talent pool for staffing.

But as Portland's housing market crowds more and more millenials and Gen X families out of the city, Vancouver is slowly becoming more and more the alternative.

>>981369
No, the market has solidified itself by pumping out reputable companies. I'd believe there's a subset of the technology market that could possibly be a bubble (the internet of things).

>>981477
Portland has become far too saturated.

I was born and raised there, but can no longer see myself moving back.

>>981477
As someone who spent all his childhood in Vancouver, and has seen a large portion of the growth of Portland as a result I find this very interesting. Leaves me to wonder what kind of growth Vancouver will experience as a result of Portlands.
I hate to say it, but I'm looking to within Portland after college. I've spent so much time in the city and neighborhoods I've come to love it. What the market will like then is beyond me;I wonder if I'll be able to get a job or even afford a house

>>981369
No.

>>981853
why?

my reasoning is that we are simply witnessing a new industry grow. there wasn't a railroad bust, the railroads just consolidated and matured and growth slowed but we still have railroads. There was no bust, and the people who invested early made a fortune.

>>981952
>there wasn't a railroad bust
Yes there was. Everything uses truck-based just-in-time logistics now. Railways have already died and now their carcass is rotting away.

>>982202
your post is pretty ignorant, passenger rail is pretty much dead outside of the northeast(if you american). but freight trains earn huge sums of money, there are still a lot of things moved by freight. literal tons. rail is still important.

It isn't solely a tech bubble.

We have a global investment crisis where the private sector has run out of worthwhile things to invest in, so you can see the things that have traditionally been easy and worthwhile investments (real estate, tech, the stock market) are being pumped like no tomorrow with minimal actual value being created.

This is what 30 years of tax cuts and deregulation has done. It will probably burst when obscenely low interest rates are no longer available. Then we can blame liberals and cut taxes some more, because obviously it's the government's fault.

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>>981415
>vanityfair
There is no bubble. This is not the 90's ffs. The tech industry is about to fucking explode, not shrink. Automation is no longer in its infancy, it's been birthed and raise to a well-mannered toddler. Automation is coming lads and it will require serious engineers, even CS.