I think that you are spot on in your analysis. If you work as an employee at a startup and the company isn't a "rocket ship" that is going to go public or be acquired and make all of the early employees wealthy, you are pretty much just helping someone else achieve their dreams. It could still be beneficial for you career-wise as startups give you a lot of leeway to learn new skills and use cool technologies, but the other side is that they can sometimes try to take over your life. They also try to get a discount on salaries by offering stock, which is usually pretty worthless in the final analysis.
I personally freelance full time. Once you establish yourself and get a reputation as someone who can get things done it can be a great career; if you stay pretty busy (last year I was working for probably 9 months, 6 of it onsite someplace and the rest spread out between a few different gigs) you can earn significantly more than at most "real" jobs and have lots of free time to work on your own projects or just go on vacation. I'd definitely recommend moving to someplace with a lot of work to do, such as San Francisco. There is a lot of demand for tech talent here that you can leverage to get the career you want.
Just wanted to point out that Ukraine is not half ethnically Russian; large parts of the country speak the Russian language but only 17% are ethnically Russian. Even these ethnic Russians are still Ukrainian citizens, making any claim by Russia to be "protecting" them rather dubious.
I just realized the article was from 2010. Good thing much of it still applies.
I think what the recruiter meant when he said "those people don't exist" was really "those people aren't available to you." In a highly competitive job market, these "unicorns" can get any job they want, or even stay independent, and both make more money and have a higher quality of life than most startups could provide. Recruiters know this as they are the ones trying to locate these people, but hiring managers might not have this perspective.
I'm sure this has been pointed out many times when these posts pop up, but what is shocking to me is that we tolerate $200k medical bills for this sort of emergency care, as long as we aren't the ones paying for them ourselves.
The healthcare industry needs a lot more transparency. Every hospital should be required (if they choose to accept Medicare/Medicaid patients) to publish prices in an easily comparable format tied to standard medical codes for every service/procedure they provide, and should be required to charge individuals without insurance no more than the government or other large insurer pays. This would seem pretty simple to implement and would, over time, help keep prices lower simply by making them public and allowing people to compare them. The information asymmetry in the industry has created a situation where people are powerless to help themselves and make smart choices with regard to getting healthcare, and has led to the creation of another expensive program that we can't afford.
Sadly, we have a system in which the industries being regulated control the dialog, and they are all too happy to tiptoe past prices and on to who is footing the bill.
Seems like a well-done service, but I would think that user management is far too strategic for most businesses to hand off to a third party.
My impression is that most people use OAuth-type authentication schemes not because they are worried about the complexities of user management, but rather that they want to gain access to the resources that those enable. In the case of Facebook and Twitter, authenticating with them provides access to new distribution channels, which is really the entire reason they are interesting in the first place.
If you're a really good PHP developer and are considering using another language, you should ask yourself one question:
Why do I need to switch?
You've already gone through the pain of learning how to work around all of its warts, and you will lose a ton of productivity immediately after switching to a new language. This may seem trivial if you are just programming as a hobby (and fun, even, to learn something new) but if you are a professional programmer, the productivity loss can be a problem. If you are a freelancer billing at a good rate, can you charge the same thing to your new client knowing things will take you twice as long and be less optimal, with bugs happening in new surprising places?
Taking on a new language needs to happen for a better reason than "the language I'm an expert in is kind of ugly." Are there libraries that are only available in the new language? Is there a different server architecture that lets you write applications with several times the performance in certain important use cases? These are valid reasons. "Too many functions in the global namespace" is not, especially if you already have them all memorized.
I personally freelance full time. Once you establish yourself and get a reputation as someone who can get things done it can be a great career; if you stay pretty busy (last year I was working for probably 9 months, 6 of it onsite someplace and the rest spread out between a few different gigs) you can earn significantly more than at most "real" jobs and have lots of free time to work on your own projects or just go on vacation. I'd definitely recommend moving to someplace with a lot of work to do, such as San Francisco. There is a lot of demand for tech talent here that you can leverage to get the career you want.