[_yj7v]

I'll tell you another reason why people underestimate difficulty of startups.

The probabilities are completely uncertain. You just never know how big it can get or how likely it is.

If you are optimistic like I was, you "hope for the best" since that one guy did it right? In essence, you don't know how hard the problem is.

In the corporate world you do know the probabilities, so you get scared by it.

TL;DR: Once you know the true probabilities you'll know which is a better option

[yashap]

I’m certainly not arguing that founding a startup is a good choice, financially or otherwise. It’s super hard and you’ll likely go bust while making very little money. Just arguing against making it seem like it’s at all easy or common to earn $3-4 mil by the age of 37 in the corporate world - it really isn’t. That’s an exceptional outcome. To do that you basically need to become an insanely young executive, or to land a job as a dev at a place like Google/FB straight out of undergrad, which is also rare.

For example, this is the typical salary range for a Senior Software Engineer in Vancouver (in CAD): https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

“Big 5” salaries in SF/Seattle are way, way above what you’ll make almost anywhere else. Lots of startups are founded outside the Bay Area/Seattle, where these types of salaries don’t really exist.

[ptrenko]

I know so many people who have Google/FB jobs straight out of college. It depends on your perspective, but its not rare.

I assume anyone who wants to startup is atleast a top 5% engineer. Otherwise its just a bad punt. You have to be terribly good to be in the startup biz