If the idea is that BigCo's who desperately need programmers are throwing cash at people in an attempt to get them, then what the OP is describing as a bubble is just a massively inefficient fad recruiting technique.

There is absolutely no reason why so many non-programmers should be getting so rich helping programmers find jobs at BigCo's. Strictly speaking the economy might demand this sort of money with this recruitment technique so economically it might be sound, but it seems to me there is a good deal of room here for disruption....

Well, it's a well-known fact that "hiring is broken".

This isn't a problem with hiring. For crying out loud, the founders of these companies aren't looking for jobs, they're founding companies. Larger companies are drooling over their customers, their products, and their people. There is a big difference.

Facebook was drooling over Instagram customers? I find this somewhat hard to swallow.

My interpretation is that OP is not arguing that BigCo's aren't currently making money.

Instead he's saying that the amount of resources being pumped into the ecosystem (financing, incubators, startups) is significantly larger than what is required.

That the market as a whole won't grow fast enough to satisfy the needs of all the investment capital being deployed.

I think the OP misses that it's like this not only in the tech sector, but many others. With the fed more than doubling the monetary base in the last couple years, that new money has to go somewhere... It goes into blowing bubbles.

Technically the Fed hasn't actually doubled the money in circulation, it has mostly just printed dollars to prop up bad assets. So the bubble there already inflated, and now the Fed is just refusing to let it pop and deflate (which it should).

Hello, zombie economy.

It's not a bubble if prices going up because of monetary policy. It's inflation.

But if inflation in different parts of the economy has different rates, than you can get a sudden re-alignment.

Hmm. Maybe if the economy inflates at differing rates it's not just because of monetary policy?

It's hard to reason about inflation because different goods do tend to inflate at differing rates. Perhaps we should measure the change in inflationary rates before and after some specific event.

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.