smart words. Especially about supporting the VCs/Angels who are putting out for the founders. The contraction will occur, who do you want to still be standing? Help them help you succeed and all will be well.
In 25 years of consulting/contracting software dev it's always paid off to not let my rates slide up to the maximum the market will bear. MSuster's "high side of normal" kind of applied there as well.
When things slow down again who do you think gets work? The people who pushed clients for all the market would bear or the ones who let rates slide up a bit, but didn't go crazy pushing for the maximum last cent. Yep, the latter.
There was a very good talk about this at #nodeconf this week by Tom from Joyent. The basic summary was that threaded network servers, like Apache, say, approach the speed problem by "pre-allocating" resources, a chunk for each thread/instance. The issue is that there are a finite number of resources on each machine (RAM mostly), and blocked threads are eating up a slice of those resources even when doing no work. This sets the upper bound of number of simultaneous connections that can be handled.
In an event based system the overhead for each connection is at least three orders of magnitude lower, sometimes four or five (hope I'm remembering this right). This translates into _considerable_ increase in number of connections that can be handled simultaneously, not quite the equivalent number of orders of magnitude due to other aspects of the system becoming more of the bottle-necks, but still dramatic.
This was a data-driven observation, not conjecture or assertion. I listened in during a break while the nodejs guys argued about approaches to getting TLS working better - they were worrying about the 1MB overhead for a TLS connection because that's a significant percentage of a connection handler. Think about that for a minute in the context of an apache threaded instance. 1MB matters? wow!
I'm new to this area and this was very interesting stuff and seemed related to the various discussions below about a threaded system can do what an event based system can do.
I had to turn down a job in the last 6 months because BigCorp couldn't allow me to take unpaid leave for the summer to take care of my son while he was out of school. So maybe not as much as you think.
"but that's not what's going to drive serious entrepreneurs to Portland" - have to disagree with you on that one.
In particular, non-20-somethings who understand about life balance and that "life is short" but still have the entrepreneurial drive are going to consider quality of life more than "live your startup" type younger folks. Though I've noticed a lot of younger people move to portland for the recreational opportunities and social scene.
Either that, or someone needs to hurry up and make the tech that allows us to download our brain/personality to hardware already so we can do without those annoying wetware limitations of requiring sleep, food and exercise. :-)