For what it's worth, I'm a 20-something working in the industry while my peers are off starting start-ups.<p>I agree with the article, at least as far as technical knowledge goes. Some friends of mine who I graduated with are starting an Instagram for music app called Cymbal in Brooklyn, and I talk to them somewhat frequently about what's going on tech-wise. They're seed-funded and have runway for the next while, and have produced a really quality app. Whether or not they'll succeed, I don't know, but I know the quality of their work isn't in question.<p>My takeaway from conversations with their back-end engineer is that he's getting a lot of experience building an infrastructure from the group up that's taking a lot of traffic, learning what to do and what not to do by things failing. He's developing the "right way to do things". By contrast, my time at Twitter as a backend/fullstack engineer has taught me a lot about what that infrastructure looks like when it's mature, and I've learned the Twitter-approved "right way to do things". We're both learning what scalable robust infrastructure looks like, but while he gets the benefit of familiarity with every part of the stack and learning first hand what works and why, I get a huge jump in general knowledge with less details.<p>Which is arguably better? We'll only know for certain when I start my own startup in a few years, but my gut feeling is that the skills I'm gaining here by perusing scaled-up systems that face hundred of millions of requests every day will serve me more. I've learned so much about good ways to build things in just my past few months that have already radically changed how I face my own personal projects, that I can't imagine sticking with code I wrote before I had this knowledge.<p>I know the article is more about industry experience as applied to creating a network of peers and the business side of things, but I'm confident it extends to the technical side as well.<p>Thoughts?