[leftside]

I think Jeff Atwood has a good point, in that your essay does have this sort of lofty view of startup founders, and implied condescension to the poor sods who didn't do that. That may not have been what you meant, but that's certainly how it comes across to someone with a more neutral view of startup culture. Your addendum doesn't really change that, because you're still positing a dichotomy of what software engineers can be: EITHER we're go-getter startup founders, XOR we're caged animals suffering as our souls slowly die, depending on which environment we end up in. In drawing those lines, I think you're missing a pretty wide range of human experience.