I can't comment on point 1 since I don't work in the Bay Area. But going by the reported this makes sense. However, there must be ways for employees to be makin

I can't comment on point 1 since I don't work in the Bay Area. But going by the reported this makes sense. However, there must be ways for employees to be making significant money, else everybody would just insist on moving to some other place. The second one doesn't resonate with me. Its okay for people to take action when they are in a position to do so. Sure I agree that its not a luxury for everybody since some labour might be easily replaceable but when people are able to force corporates to correct course, that is a good thing. As far as the thing with young programmers go, I can understand. Most of us didn't really handle very big projects since it was never necessary. Aside from some courses, most involved writing assignment level code which doesn't require much thought over issues like code design. And they were never graded as such except for certain courses where a few commits actually made it the main code base of some big project. Experienced programmers (like yourself) aren't required to write code as much as mentor others, otherwise most of the young and immature ones would just convert to old and immature programmers.