Essay idea: stickiness of housing and job markets

The value of skills in the job market is always backwards-looking, just like comparable sales in a housing market. I have forgotten where this essay idea was going, but I think it was going to be a personal essay about going to work on mortgage-backed securities, learning about house-price appreciation, and then trying to find work elsewhere in finance.

"A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much. ... this is partly because great hackers don't know how good they are. ... it's also because money is not the main thing they want." (Paul Graham, "Great Hackers", July 2004, http://paulgraham.com/gh.html, in The Best Software Writing I, edited by Joel Spolsky (Apress, 2005))