You are certainly an enlightened "youngster" ... I didn't even think about this sort of question until I was much older. But I did quit college to join a start

You are certainly an enlightened "youngster" ... I didn't even think about this sort of question until I was much older. But I did quit college to join a start-up as the third employee (in the tech arena) and then went to work for 2 more start-ups where I was the second and seventh employee. In 2001, I took a job with a publicly traded company which at the time had around 1700 employees. The group I worked for had around 55 people and was a completely new line-of-business for the company. The company's president treated us like a start-up and was basically our investor. My first real task there was figuring out why we weren't generating the amount of code we should have been ... it led to getting rid of about 20 people that weren't contributing but were slowing the rest of the team down. Curiously, these same people were the BDUF, ex-military contract people that had injected the corporate behavior into our little group. Unfortunately, the larger company bought a few more companies in the same space, merged the groups together without a mandate and we became just another department. And with that there became a pressing need to behave as the other corporate drones ... go get honey, bring it back to the hive and lay the paperwork so others could also find the source of your nectar. So this was the first and last time I intend to be employed by a large corporation. I just find it hard to tolerate the low expectations of productivity. If they only realized how much they give up in the interest of conformity. As far as putting your age on future posts, my question would be "why would you remove it?" You wrote an excellent article and you'll be commended for it by those who favor excellence. Everyone else is irrelevant!