[ZainRiz]

It's not true that you have to loose work life balance at the higher paying companies.

Speaking as someone who's worked at both Microsoft, Google, and Stripe your work life balance is completely up to you (Amazon is an outlier)

The average engineer at all those places has a decent work life balance, and in fact from what I saw working longer hours did NOT correlate strongly with improved career outcomes.

The only exception to this is that some of the better managers I saw tended to spend more hours working. But I think that came more from their ambition than an innate requirement of their positions: They wanted to keep going up the ladder so they kept trying to take on more and more responsibilities. Other managers I had who weren't as ambitious kept a good work/life balance and were still happy. Again, it's up to you.