I presume you meant one way NDA, your overall point is a really good one. Contracts are very useful as a leading indicator of how the counterparty thinks about the relationship.
FWIW professional liability insurance absolutely can make sense, even be necessary when writing software, depending on the nature of the contract and your overall responsibilities.
Startups in the valley were a thing well before low interest rates were even imagined. Interest rates change the landscape, but it's hardly a prerequisite.
> All enhancing an employee's career does is ensure that they have leverage to negotiate higher salaries or leaving the company. No company wants this.
Explicitly, no. Growing talent inside is far less risky than hiring from the outside. Sometimes that means someone will leave, yes - but if the relationship is good they will do it at the right time when they are ready, not when they are miserable. This is win win. Long term net positives here are hard to understate.
> I can only assume that it doesn't exist or that it is so rare that it may as well not exist.
Well I can equally attest your assumption is false. But this is probably just a demonstration that path dependence is a real thing.
All I can say is you have a very negative view of the whole situation, which doesn't match my experience at all, or that of many people I know.
> No manager is paid to care about an employee's career that I have ever seen or heard of.
This is an incredibly common part of the role(s), so my guess is that you have been unlucky in this.
For what it's worth, all the strong managers I've ever know or worked with pay attention this this, and vast majority of companies (again in my experience) made it an explicit part of their role.
I'd go so far as to say as a people manager (as opposed to a project manager, say) you cannot do a great job without considering things like career progression, because if you don't, you don't understand your team well enough to be really effective.
In this context (and the usage is not always consistent) it's probably easiest to think about leadership as an activity and (people) management as a role. If you are not formally responsible for some aspect of other peoples jobs and career you are not "managing them" but you may be leading them (e.g. as a senior engineer, or mentor, or in terms of a project design, etc.).
I know a bunch of software engineers who haven't followed this trajectory, and I suspect that's where the this advice was aimed.
Particularly if you start off recently(ish) on the SWE FAANG track and were lucky with RSU timing etc., you'll find a lot of the options that come your way don't pay nearly as well. But you may find them exciting anyway.
> If the law is changed it will not only limit Peter Thiel from doing this but also you and me.
That obviously not necessarily true. One can imagine a change in law that limits tax sheltering of this type for any individual to say, 10mm. A tiny fraction of the population would be affected.
This is the real weakness of most MOOCs. Most people are not disciplined enough to do nearly enough of the real work themselves without some sort of outside incentive. At least not until they have several years of practice.
Physics is a bit like that anyway though, you can't learn it by reading or listening to anyone, you have to solve things yourself from scratch, usually multiple times.
Reading good books/having good lecturers certainly helps, but there is no way to replace the work.