That's extremely true. I remember how the banks used bailout money to pay out bonuses. There was an uproar about it, and they scaled it back, but I remember t

That's extremely true. I remember how the banks used bailout money to pay out bonuses. There was an uproar about it, and they scaled it back, but I remember the banks arguing that if they were going to survive these turbulent times, they'd need to keep the top talent, and that meant bonuses. There was that indignant letter to the nytimes from an AIG employee (salary + bonus around 700K) who was angry that people were angry about his bonus, since he had "nothing to do" with the people who ruined the company (his analogy was that it was like blaming the plumber when the electrician burns the house down). I worked for a startup that tanked. Lots of people put a lot of their lives into it. Options were worthless (and I knew people who had worked for 7 years or more) The startup kind of made the last payroll. We got our regular paychecks, but they failed to pay out all of the vacation time. We found new jobs, and moved on with our lives. Nice thing about high tech culture is that the experience (even the failure) made more more employable, not less. So in that sense, you can fail in the valley.