Yeah, well...most software development work sucks, too. There's no magical career path that guarantees success without "suck".
In any case, unless you've personally served time as a doctor or a lawyer, you might want to tone down the rhetoric a notch. Because whatever the intangible benefits of devoting your young life to a startup, I can guarantee that ten years from now, there are going to be a lot of cynical 30-somethings who feel screwed that they didn't get rich from web 2.0.
It seems that every generation has to discover the law of "no free lunch" for themselves.
I'm also a 30-something. It would have been clearer to say that I met a lot of cynical 20-somethings in grad school, who are now cynical 30-somethings.
More than one friend is a veteran of the first boom, with little to show for it.
Hey, at least they tried. I dismissed the first wave as a fad and didn't pay any attention to it. For the most part it was a fad, but there were opportunities...
To answer your other point, I make no claims the world owes it to me to be successful. But if I'm not I'll eat out of a dumpster and you won't hear me bitching about it.
If there really is no such thing as a free lunch then it should follow that there is conservation of utility for the sum total one's compensation. And, therefore, if one is compensated with a prestigious title then one should be less compensated in other ways, be it through making less money or having less job satisfaction or what have you.
But that doesn't undermine the point. Assuming an efficient job market, anything that makes a job more attractive in one respect ought to cause it to be less attractive in other respects, all things being equal. Whether that attractive thing is in the gift of the employer, or at the expense of the employer, should be neither here nor there.
(Obviously an efficient job market is a big assumption, but that's a different question.)
Lots of people (who generally aren't the startup type) plan their careers so that their titles and resumes take them where they want to be. I know a pc technician who took a short-term salary drop to get the words "software" and "developer" closer together on his resume.
I don't claim it's 100% efficient. But I do think there is a high degree of efficiency. We spend most of our lives chasing social status without even thinking about it. Be it through going to school to get a degree, going off to war to become a hero, leveling up your character in WoW, etc. It doesn't take a statistics degree to see the pattern; things that are good for "prestigiousness" are rarely good for much else.
"things that are good for "prestigiousness" are rarely good for much else"
Oh, come on. Now you're just being silly.
Even the article tells you that you're wrong. Legal and medical jobs may be boring and/or tedious, but they pay about as well as you can ever expect to be paid in this country, without being insanely lucky.
Basically, you're succumbing to survivor's bias: you see the stories of the lucky entrepreneurs, so you're relatively unaware of the (vast majority of) people who never make it big (and who end up working in corporate jobs for the rest of their lives). Meanwhile, the people who labor for decades to achieve career success as doctors or lawyers strike you as unglamorous wage slaves, next to the Paul Bucheits and Jamie Zawinskis of the world.
But as I said before, there's no free lunch; nobody is going to let you succeed without a lot of work, or a lot of luck. So you either trust your fate to randomness (high variance; a lot of luck), or you methodically start climbing your way up the greased pole (low variance; a little luck).
Overall, the expected value of career success is higher for the doctors and lawyers, and the variance is lower. That's why people pursue the degree -- not out of some blind faith in title and prestige.
Tragically, no. I briefly worked at a company where the receptionist was seriously called that. It was a very large australian software company (well large for .au standards, which is not huge).
