[ageoldlie]

Could not agree more. Experience is hugely valuable. Unfortunately, the way a lot of smaller less-funded companies like ours work is that we take the "brilliant ideas" from someone else (often university research but also sometimes insights gleaned through in-house interview process) and implement them for our customers. The vast bulk of our contribution is what you might call "scut work" (often the kind of thing that gets farmed out to grad students and post-docs on the academia side when they want to build a working prototype) and faster rather than smarter is what enables us to compete most effectively with the rest of our market. I wish it weren't this way. I'd still like to be doing technical work myself, in a more carefree and supportive environment, with all the protections that union members in other trades (like law enforcement and primary education) appear to enjoy. But it seems that the technology sector the world over is moving more and more in the direction of "at will" employment where everyone (except when it comes to affirmative action for certain protected classes) has to fight for their own survival until they get too old to put up much of a fight anymore. "Capitalism is cannibalism" is what one of my first supervisors told me right before I got laid off in 2002, and from where I sit today, I feel like truer words could not have been spoken.