I can't help but feel that this may all be a new corporate structure where the financiers are still in charge, but instead of expectations for corporations to offer real benefits, career progression, R&D budgets, and training of entry level people, we have the perfect excuse to avoid all of that - "we're a startup, and we just can't afford it." I'm not sure it's as healthy as it sounds when you just romanticize entrepeneurship for it's own sake, especially when they make no qualms that taking investor money is part of the goal.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
"Entrepreneurs are the new labor. Or to put it in a more useful way, the balance of power between investors and entrepreneurs that marks the early, frontier days of a major technology wave (Moore’s Law and the Internet in this case) has fallen apart. "
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
"a labor class emerges when privileged knowledge is commoditized and institutionalized in ways that make it basically useless as negotiation leverage with the investor class, leaving supply aggregation as the only path left for the extracted and intellectually bankrupted class. The extracted knowledge is placed under the stewardship of a new mercenary class that eventually turns into a domesticated new middle class (this pattern is not just restricted to the 19th century; variants have played out at least a few times before in world history)."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/04/entrepre...
"The new financial order will comprise members representing the largest new economy companies, as well as members of the investor class who survive the ongoing collapse of credibility of their home institutions. Political participation in the new order will come not from nation-states or provincial governments, but city/urban political systems. "
And if you're a qualified tech worker, you can say "no thank you" and go to a company that does provide all those things. Startups are not the only employer.
