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we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary
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No one is invested in the future of the company or what happens to the product because no one is going to be rewarded if things go well. Without ownership or profit sharing of some sort, no one who is worth anything will stick around to work 11 hour days unless the work environment is so amazing that they can get compensated other ways. The reality is, without profitability, those alternative means of compensation (extra hardware/software budget, extra flex time/vacation time, etc) won't hold up for long. It sounds like you are working for someone who has read Spolsky but really has no idea what he's on about. Does your SDLC pass the Joel test? (one step builds, testing, source control, bug database, etc etc). Are you working on brand new computers with at least 2 big monitors and more ram and storage space than any reasonable person should ever need? Do you get to set your own schedules as long as you are meeting deadlines/goals/pushes? Are you in offices or cubicles? If cubicles does everyone have a good pair of headphones? Are the cubicles or offices big enough? Is it acceptable for people to take a break and surf slashdot/Youtube/CNN for a few minutes when their brain buffer is blown and they can't concentrate? I'm not talking about come in and surf for 10 hours, but is it an environment where everyone has to be ultra careful about what's up on their screen and makes extra effort to look busy or stressed out enough to be taken seriously or is it the sort of place where people are treated like adults and given the benefit of the doubt as long as they're getting their commits in, QA'd, and past testing by the next milestone/goalpost/sprint/push/whatever?

If you are working for a startup, you really should believe in and be passionate about the product and the company and they should be passionate about you and your team! If it's really such a great idea there ought to be room for ownership and compensation for everyone involved on the ground floor and even the first couple of floors. People are what make a company great. It takes strong leaders, it takes a lot of faith and inspiration in what you are doing and it takes talented and hard working teams who are united in a common goal of making the best damn whatsy-whosit that's ever been dreamed of.

From your post it sounds like you're talking about a half baked company with tolerable but not stellar management and whatever talent the going market rate could buy. Which can be anywhere from pretty good, to so-so to absolutely dismal depending on a lot of factors.

Sure, there are companies out there doing it right or at least trying, but there are many who are looking to

1. Replace experienced workers with inexperienced ones at half to 2/3rds salary.

2.Hire architects to design and document complex systems and then hire the equivalent of janitors to do maintenance and upgrade work. Eventually the center cannot hold and you end up with a complex nest of band aids and workarounds worthy only of submission to TDWTF.

3.Replace creative thinking, problem solving and innovation with documentation of procedure whereby routine tasks are accomplished by following rote procedures and recipes that a trained monkey can follow, but which don't really address all the real world failure points in the process or how to even detect them much less correct them. Worse yet, since policy is to follow the procedure, updating said procedure is usually next to impossible to get approved.

Most of this comes from a fundamental mistrust and misunderstanding of the value and role of IT within an organization. IT as a whole is viewed as a sausage grinder into which many companies pour their most critical business problems and hope that what comes out is a solution everyone can stomach. IT doesn't fix business problems, it fixes Information and automation problems. If you make poor decisions and ask IT to implement them, and the whole thing goes up in flames it doesn't mean IT failed you and many companies don't seem to grasp that.

The issue with your argument is that not all cars are created equal. Many cars on the road are equipped to operate well above operating tolerances assumed for these so called 'maximum safe speeds.' That said, the problem isn't the cars, it's the drivers. No matter how awesome your car is, the real limiting factor is the other people you share the road with. If you want to be remotely responsible about it, you have to assume a bare minimum of driving ability from each and every other driver on the road with you.

Your sudden lane change to avoid creaming them while they crawl along in the fast lane, even though you've been approaching them at high speed for the last minute and a half doesn't mean they won't see your front grill in the rear view and immediately swerve into the lane they should have been driving in in the first place. You see, your reasonable expectation that they won't drift into your lane as you attempt to pass goes right out the window when put up against their important cell phone call, while they're trying to pick spinach out of their teeth from lunch and change the DVD for the three kids in the back.

For your safety and theirs, it's always best to drive as conservatively and defensively as possible. No matter how much less fun it is. Find a track, or a truly deserted place to let loose instead of your local interstate.

There are all kinds of different 'coders' these days. They have their own idioms, ideals, tools and culture. You will find people who will try to convince you that Python is the Holy Grail, others will tell you that Ruby is the one true path. (Although usually the story is so over the top, you end up missing the simplicity and beauty of Ruby, all you know is she got "Railed" for three days straight and is now servicing millions of requests, at least when she's not busy batting eyelashes at some Mongrel or really anybody as long as they have a really Fast CGI.)

Most development these days is taking place between all these tubes that make up the interwebs. That means you're usually looking at something that runs on, through or near some sort of web or app server. Set yourself up with a local web server or app server configured with whatever jingles your bells, and get to it. There is no right or wrong way to go about it, and even if you kiss a lot of frogs, you'll eventually find your favorite way to php/jruby/jython/plone/java/flex/lasso/squeak/perl_mod/whatever your way into web programming and Service Oriented Architecture (Which is just a fancy way of saying functions (which are now methods) are actually now web services, that you call remotely (But not like COM or CORBA remotely) but more like REST or SOAP remotely, but at the end of the day they do the same darn thing. Along the way if anyone asks you about relational databases, give them a smug look, shake your head knowingly and walk off muttering something about an impedance mishmash and threaten to hibernate until they propel the conversation elsewhere.

Of course, none of this is going to matter because the world will end tomorrow. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to pack my towel and go get some beer.