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I like your idea. I expect if they implemented it they would see that the article gets it wrong on a number of levels. Take any successful company, Google, Intel, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Boeing, any of them. Now compile a list of the first 10 - 100 employees. Now take the net worth for those individuals and compare it to the rest of the world. You'll find it lands north of the 99th percentile. Y…
The Valley has changed. If you started in the 1990s, you got real equity and housing costs were low. You could get into the low millions just by working hard and living frugally. It was a different time-- more egalitarian and far more engineer-driven. The question is: if you're 22-25 now and move into the Bay, do you have a good chance of ending up a made man (or woman)? The answer is "no". It's been overrun by MBA c…
Your question is identical to the one posed in 1999 during the first 'bubble' people saying "Oh but now it has gotten so inflated and ridiculous, someone moving here now doesn't stand a chance" and yet here we are in 2014 with a bunch of new LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and other millionaires. In '84 when I moved here it was the 'great semiconductor dying' where places like Intel argued they were a good company because they were losing money less quickly than any other semiconductor company. Or had you been here in the 70's when cutbacks on defense work was the 'death knell' for the valley. What the observations miss is that the value is in the change not in the status quo.
If you move here as a 22 - 25 year old I think you continue to have a better chance of becoming financially independent than you would elsewhere. But its not a 'done deal', there is always luck, choices, and opportunities. Every time something fundamental changes, it creates a shift. In the last part of the 20th century it was the arrival of cheap computation, in the early 21st century the arrival of the Internet. Both created big shifts and opened up big opportunities to create value and wealth. They appear and vanish. I find it amusing that much of the money that went into my house came from Sun stock which, when I sold the last bit was worth very little, but during that time when it was valuable it became a part of my house. I see three candidates leading the next wave, adding autonomy to normally non-autonomous products (cars, trucks, lawn mowers), ubiquitous sensing to achieve better efficiencies in raw material usage (farming, manufacturing, housing, etc) and information economics (changing the way information is priced, bought, and sold). These are all emerging even as we're exploiting the tail end of social and Internet everywhere.
But here is the thing, if your 22, thing about being 'made' when you are 52, not when you are 25. And if you are suddenly "rich" at 25 think about how to make sure you are still rich enough when you're done working for others.