A part of the reason that these larger companies are having to resort to acquisitions as a hiring mechanism for good programmers is because the bubble is encour

A part of the reason that these larger companies are having to resort to acquisitions as a hiring mechanism for good programmers is because the bubble is encouraging good programmers to leave larger corporate environments to either start their own startups or join their peers at their startups. The bubble investment environment is allowing non-profitable companies to pay large salaries for engineers that they couldn't otherwise afford. The sheer amount of money feeding into this startup bubble is inducing this at a massive scale, driving up the price of programmers across industries.