You weren't meant to have a boss

Unfortunately, student loans constrain the freedom of action of many recent graduates. They have to have that income to make the payments, which can be quite high.

This of course favors upper middle class people as young company founders.

Yes, that is a real problem. I thought of mentioning this in the essay. The problem is the same as with visas: the government's definition of work is a job working for someone else.

I hope eventually they'll wise up and change the rules about student loans, because the intent of the rules about repayment is not simply to get the money back as soon as possible, but to discourage people from merely slacking after college. And on that scale founders are actually doing better than regular employees.

There are small companies like one of the startups our host sponsors, or like those Joel Spolsky runs, and then there are those which languish under the them of a boss who is living a good life while 1 to 5 or so programmers slave over ancient technology and insane customers.

So qualify your employer carefully before you go to a small company. In particular, if they are using old technology, run away, nothing they do or say can be trusted.

Some interesting problems require more than 8-10 people, no matter how insanely great they are. I work at a highly interdisciplinary biotech startup. My instrument SW team is eight guys, the tools-for-scientists team four, mathematicians are about five, etc.; then you have a bunch of physicists, chemists, biochemists, etc. etc. I'd rather suffer the problems of a large company than work on a more pure software problem.

I'm not sure if you have to go back as far as the savanna for a comparison. I'd regard the lowest level in corporates as servants of the boss, the bosses job is to fight off the other bosses and acquire resources for his people, so that he can acquire more stuff and convince his bosses that he can use the resources more efficiently.

Corporates are more a feudal hierarchy, whereas startups I liken to the old guilds of Europe that evolved out of the feudal system, it has been said that programming is one of the few crafts left, and so the comparison may be appropriate. The guilds occurred because the craftsmen had skills that weren't available to all, and so could demand a premium for there services, much like programming (and writing, and graphic design - witness the recent writers strike)

Maybe there is a new republic on the way all we need is to lop off the heads of a few managers :-). Let them eat cake!