[dasil003]

Agree if you want to be a millionaire by your mid-30s then aiming for FAANG and saving most of your salary is the most statistically reliable path for a reasonably smart technically-minded person.

However the next question is whether you are 100% optimizing for money, because there are a lot of other considerations. First of all, working at Google with the best tools, at the largest scale, and the smartest colleagues will teach you a certain way of doing things. What it won't teach you is how to bootstrap a successful business with open source and cheap SaaS components. The type of resourcefulness you learn will be around navigating a specific corporate culture, which is arguably less generally applicable than figuring out how to solve problems in startups or more average companies that aren't funded by insurmountable moats built decades ago for which your impact as a late-stage incoming IC will be negligible. Also if you have a twenty year timeline, realize that these companies' reputations are a lagging indicator and the situation on the ground could change a lot and disrupt many of your assumptions.

But my point is not to endorse an alternate path. If you can enjoy your work and also get paid more, that's the dream. However I would very much caution against slogging through something you hate in the hopes of some distant payoff. Life is about the journey not the destination.

[ptrenko]

Yeah I've learned a lot about boostrapping working at a startup in college. The physics is completely different.

You have to be very very efficient. You understand why Heroku costs 3x of AWS. You understand that raising money is not necessary for every project. For most tourist entrepreneurs its just cargo culting.

But now I think I wanna spend a good 10 years in corporate before even thinking of doing anything else. Make that moolah first.