If you want good value for your house-hunting dollar, stay far, far away from Silicon Valley. According to CNN, both San Mateo and Marin counties are experiencing a record-breaking real estate boom — a two-bedroom house can run you half a million bucks — driven by burgeoning salaries in the high-tech industry. "Getting warm bodies to fill all the positions in Silicon Valley has always been a problem," says TIME Digital editor Joshua Quittner. And now, as tech stocks skyrocket and IPO documents litter the floors, the problem is even worse. "This is an extraordinarily rich job market," says Quittner. "They've got all this money, and they're ready to ramp up their businesses, but in such a tight market they may not be able to get the people they need." That could mean that in the long run, the quality of tech workers' labor will suffer, and production will lag.
That, of course, is the pessimistic prognosis — and so far it's been proven wrong, most recently by the Labor Department's announcement Tuesday that productivity was up 2.9 percent in 1999, to the highest level since 1992. Workers are producing more and meeting the demands of a robust economy, which means employers are spared the expense of hiring new labor. So while Silicon Valley's culture of smug satisfaction may be hard for the rest of the country to bear, at least the government data shows there's plenty of optimism to go around — at least for now.