There are often posts on here showing that it is better to spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your resume.
I think there is a lot of truth in that.
And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then not make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I doubt it
It drives me nuts when people point at engineers making $1M on a startup exit, without counting the average income over their tenure.
If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure, that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.
The economics of the Bay Area really distorts things. If you make 2M over 10 years, you will almost certainly have enough money to live a good life (never go hungry, able to travel, etc), but you will absolutely not have enough to buy a house or start a family. I think this realization is what drives folks to take a third path, which is starting at established Big Tech companies before moving to early stage startups.
I almost fell for the trap a few years ago, someone was trying to convince me that making 200k in the Bay Area for 5 years and then "retiring" back to my mid-size city was far more profitable than just staying put near my family and friends and making a "measly" half of that, in a place where houses costs a third as much and the lifestyle is healthier.
It can look like a false dichotomy because we are posting short blurbs on the internet, not the pros/cons of a thousand different life stories so we can categorize them into a dozen possible outcomes so we have more than two examples.
But it is very much a common theme in High Earning/Low Success Rate roles, to have a lot of people shoot for them, fall short, and be in a worse position than if they had studied and stayed some more mundane course.
Yep - one could say that "a relatively small amount of force applied in just the right place" is enough for people to make bona fide bad decisions both career-wise and financially by chasing unrealistic dreams that have ultimately done them a huge disservice.
At best they can dust themselves off after a few years and "catch up" to where their potential should have been, at worst they are financially ruined and laden with debt as they tried to boot-strap their crap startup idea while PG et al laugh all the way to the bank at these poor impressionable people's expense.
I think there is a lot of truth in that.
And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then not make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I doubt it