Aneel Lakhani

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?” Particularly operations. That’s not even what I cover or talk about, yet the question keeps coming up.

I don’t think it’s a fundamental 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.

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