mightykipper

Depending on sector, you may find you only get traction through recruiters. I work in finance, almost everything is through third party recruiters and there are two reasons for this.

1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.

2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

127°C, so it is room temperature if you first set your room alight.

Or Roger Penrose. Don't know if he's still publishing but he's 90 now and he had papers published in 2011, which must count him as old.

The author also seems to forget recently departed physics genius Steven Hawking, still working until his death at 76 afaik.

As my wife often tells me, if you're regularly being outcompeted by a guy that can't speak your language, hasn't got your contacts and may not have any experience in the industry, it's your problem. Use your network, competing on a level playing field is just stupid. Applying for jobs nobody else knows about is a fuckton easier than waiting until you're actually competing with people.

Yes and no. It's not feasible for me, and I don't know you but I'm gonna go ahead and day it's not feasible for you either. The barriers to entry are extremely high, regulators need to be convinced you know what you're doing, as do banks, and you need to be accepted by enough places for it to be worthwhile people paying for things through you and merchants paying your fee to accept you. You can choose to do only parts of the payments processing picture and that's easier, but it's not easy. Bottom end startup costs would likely be in the hundreds of thousands, ignoring actually developing your payments platform (so just to get everyone onside and regulatory approvals etc), more realistically a budget of say low tens of millions might get one off the ground.