It's important to separate out the long-term trend from the business cycle. This business-cycle surge (which some call "the bubble") will crash, and then we'll

It's important to separate out the long-term trend from the business cycle. This business-cycle surge (which some call "the bubble") will crash, and then we'll see a rather different series of articles moaning that the web industry was overhyped and there's all these folks around who only know how to build Facebook Poking apps but can't find work, in the future we'll only need 17 Facebook programmers and they'll all live in some faraway country where the rent is cheap, blah blah blah, I have lived through this movie before. Behind all this sturm und drang is a very real growth in the need for web talent, and I agree with the article that the training system for talented people is broken-to-nonexistent. But the industry is healthy and will probably remain so for the foreseeable decades. (Though, as usual, the industry will evolve and all the tools, skillsets, and job descriptions will look different in ten years.) It's just that superimposed on the healthy industry is a cycle of unhealthy-looking talent shortages alternating with unhealthy-looking talent gluts. You can always make the picture look more risky, frenetic, and unsustainable than it is if you focus on the movements of the fashionable froth that forms on the top of the industry ocean. Fashion is that way by design.