Where are you? Perhaps it's geography, not age. Industry veterans seem to have no trouble getting interviews here in Seattle. I think willingness to move might be the underlying cause in some cases as we establish more roots in the community as we age.

Why? Its not enough to point at the debt and say "scary, disaster is coming". By what mechanism do you assume our debt will kill us? Everyone's debt is someone else's asset, in the federal government's case about 2/3 is held domestically (http://www.factcheck.org/2013/11/who-holds-our-debt/). That means the majority of that debt is held by US institutions or individuals. Once you understand that, you realize most of our debt is just another form of wealth transfer, and is not more inherently dangerous than taxes, social security, or other wealth transfer mechanisms.

Just look at Japan - a much more heavily indebted country (but crucially also with its own currency). They have been piling on debt far larger in relation to their economy than ours for 30 years, and it hasn't "killed" them yet, how would ours? http://cdn.tradingeconomics.co....

I don't get these "encrypted" cloud storage providers. The only way to truly trust them, is to never hand them the keys in the first place, encrypt client side. Many customers security savy enough to want encryption also realize server side cloud encryption is broken by design. No surprise to me they shut down, I don't see who would be there customers.

Encrypt locally using any of the good open source crypto libraries, or a free tool like TrueCrypt, and THEN store in the cloud with standard mechanisms like google drive or S3, cheaper too. Keep the keys in a separate place. This way it take a double compromise - both the key storage and the data storage, before your data is compromised.

Most of the comments so far seem to take the article at face value, so I thought I'd offer an alternative perspective. I've worked at Amazon for several years as a software engineer, on two different teams, and my experience has been a far cry from what is described in the article. Is hard work encouraged? Sure. Do I work 80 hours a week? Absolutely not. I average around 50. I don't take my laptop home at night, and I don't get work email on my phone. I certainly am not expected to respond while on vacation. Those women in my department who have left on maternity leave have come back and been promoted, seemingly contrary to the harsh treatment described.

The other engineers I work with are some of the smartest and best I've met in my career (i've worked at several other large companies), and there is certainly an overall goal of excellence. Feedback and discussion is strongly encouraged, but I've never seen anyone break down into tears at work. The leadership principles cited are accurate, but my experience with them has been seemingly more in line with their original intentions.

Their sampling seems biased to those who have left the company, either voluntarily or forced, which suggests to me there may be a negative bias. If you ever saw this comic: http://www.bonkersworld.net/im... , you may understand Amazon operates many independent divisions, I suspect the experience of employees varies by division. I don't know if NYT sought out particular opinions, but they only gave a sentence or two to those veterans they encountered with a positive experience - literally this line:

It seems like focusing on those experiences wouldn't have made as sensational of an article though.

So you're telling me if you lock an obese person up, and feed them nothing but 1k calories of vegetables a day for a month, they won't lose weight? I don't believe you.

Your statements contradict each other - the first trivializes the benefits saying "nothing really happens" and the second turns around and says a serious negative impact is the actual result. There are positive and negative consequences to raising the minimum wage but the effects are very real on both sides, your post is obviously biased towards negative outcomes. Raising the minimum wage by 67%, for a city where a third of the population makes less than 15$ an hour, makes a huge difference for those who retain their jobs. Price inflation will not feedback through all goods and services, because not everything is made with minimum wage workers, and it takes time for prices to feed through. The effect will be very real and very positive for those who keep their jobs. Now there are potentially serious negative consequences of this raise, it would seem possible to destroy some jobs - either to automation, or moving them elsewhere (US or overseas), as it changes the relative price of labor and capital, and between labor markets. It is no panacea, but statistical studies comparing past minimum wage studies have generally indicated minimal actual negative effects, see this study for representative example: http://www.cepr.net/documents/...

Your argument has a surface level truthiness that I found myself agreeing with until I realize the logic was quite flawed. I'll paraphrase your argument, "he was already rich and then he risked his money to start new companies so he must not be motivated by money". Take a counter assumption, assume he was always greedy, does having money prevent you from wanting more or taking risks to get it, just because you have enough in most peoples standards? I think clearly not. Musk might be motivated by things other than money, certainly he seems to have a fascination with Space, but you can't draw that conclusion based on the fact he was already rich ... are the Koch brothers not motivated by money just because they are already rich or take risks?

Let me offer a different perspective. I work in Seattle, one of those hotbeds you mention, but I was recruited here at 30, not right out of school. I think the reason you see the market as stale is that you were a network admin. That role is being automated at a rapid pace. I hope you are studying CS for your bachelors and not "IT". I watch my team struggle every day to find good quality software engineers (not IT admins). We pay well above industry average (50% more), including full relocation costs from across the country, we just can't find enough good software engineers willing to relocate to Seattle. I've done a number of our interviews, and I can attest we don't care what qualifications you have honestly, or your age, or anything else really, as long as you can demonstrate good critical thinking, good design fundamentals, and the ability to write good code.

If you are breezing through your CS degree because it is all old hat to you, don't abandon your path, send me your resume! In fact, it doesn't even matter what is in the resume, just make sure it has the right words to get by HR (antiquated useless gatekeepers they are, personal recommendation is the best way to bypass them), the interviewers don't even read it. Like I said they only care about your ability to demonstrate the skills we want.

P.S. oops, posted this accidentally anon earlier

This is /. were you expecting anything else?

"The real inflation in USA has not been reported since Nixon either"

Look - verifying the accuracy of government statistics is great, but this has been proven wrong over and over. Conspiracy theories on inflation serve nobody's best interest, how do these zombie rumors never die? Are you going to accuse MIT of being in on the conspiracy too? Check out their billion price index - http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ and compare it with the CPI, MIT offers handy graphs already doing that. There are good sound reasons for why the inflation tracking methodology has been updated over time, and while it will always be slightly off like all estimates, gross exaggerations like GP's 11-15% are just absurb. While oil and food may have been getting more expensive, clothing, consumer electronics, and natural gas prices have been falling, you have to look at the overall picture.

I wonder how much money you just made him? At least +5 from me.

While I agree with the sentiment of your overall post, that adequate disclosure helps protect individual investors, I take issue with the part quoted.

• Pension funds are hardly individual investors. They generally have investment committees and experienced portfolio managers. While some of these managers should be fired for incompetence, that is on a case by case basis, not systemic.
• I don't see how being invested in Hedge Funds (HF) in 2008 was terrible for pensions. HF typically take the place of public or private equity as one of the riskier asset classes held. HF instead of equity was a good call relatively speaking. For 2008, HF were -18.3% (ouch) but S&P 500 was -37%! (1) . I'm guessing you are confusing HFs with something that actually blew up like bank stocks or bond insurers, or the market in general?
• If the proper level of disclosure is there, why should only rich (the practical implementations of qualified investor) people be allowed to make any investment returns on smaller, exciting companies?

The public, meaning those not rich enough to access the private funds that typically require accredited investor status (5mil+), are shafted because by extending the time companies stay under the private umbrella, a company can achieve its maximum valuation by IPO time. Companies no longer need to access public markets to get the capital they need to grow, IPOs become less about acquiring funding and more about cashing out. Even the private investors are forced to take a larger gamble on a company under no obligation to provide the level of disclosure they would going public. The big winners are the banks which get to skim in the private shares transactions at much higher rates as they are gatekeepers to limited private shares, as well as companies like Facebook that get funding without the disclosure.