Working for 2+ decades while making something like $150k+ a year on average over the long term , and retiring with substantial savings , without having worked 100 hour weeks on the startup lottery , sounds pretty awesome to me.
Other companies pay great salaries. In Detroit, for example, you can make 100-130k with a much lower cost of living (even if you're living downtown or in one of the wealthy suburbs). I presume Chicago, Boston, ATL, etc., would be just as lucrative if not moreso. If the bar is based on salary and hours, you can make it in a lot of places.
Arguably if your goal as a software developer is to make as much money as possible and retire as soon as possible, you should probably work on HFT in the lowest-COL area that supports that field (maybe Chicago with a long train commute or something?)
I'm a team lead and make less than an entry level developer at any SF or NYC shop, but I'm willing to bet that I can save more and have more put away for retirement than most as well.
This is along the lines of what Mr. Money Mustache [0] recommends, minus the long commute. For anyone interested in early retirement through working hard and saving money, his blog is absolutely worth a read.
It could be a bit of a lifestyle change (or maybe you're already close and you don't know it!), but for people with software-developer-level salaries, early retirement is absolutely within reach.
Different strokes for different folks. Some people use airplanes for transportation, others go skydiving. The start-up lottery is a very fast way to learn a lot and probably not earn much, think of it as a school rather than a money making machine and it makes a lot more sense. If you then later apply all that you learned during those years in a non-start-up context you may still come out ahead.
>>If you then later apply all that you learned during those years in a non-start-up context you may still come out ahead.
Unless the start up had something to do with politics, and you learned a lot about politics, you can't use any of your skills(related to actual work) to 'come out ahead' in a big company.
Not everyone wants to work on developing consumer App/Product, marketing and sales. There are people who would like to work on libraries, algorithms or just a large swat of data. I'm sure people developing React, Angular, Bootstrap, TensorFlow etc are happy with what they are doing.
yeah, 60 hour weeks that are rule rather than a true exception mean that you have no/very little actual life.
Yes, it helps in professional career, and for some this is their goal in life, but for most of us, we work to live.
what working for somebody else means is (among others) peace of mind - I do my hours, extra effort if necessary, but that's it.
the moment i leave office, I can go climbing with my fiancee, take care of kids (not there yet), and generally do stuff I wil have fond memories of, rather than chasing gazillionth thing just to keep things running.
Even a short stint and an "Ex-Googler" tag on your resume is enough to open doors and keep landing gigs years into the future.
Moreover the top firms are known for engineering the shit out of their software. You're much less likely to run into really bad code or stagnate.
So its definitely worth sacrificing a bit to try and get in.