[anonytrary]

> freedom to focus on deep coding problems without fear of where the next paycheck is coming

Depends on your risk tolerance. You will most likely not be able to profit greatly off of your deep coding problems if you do them for a company with highly stratified reporting chains. Profits will get passed around to the idiots above you in the chain of command, leaving you with peanuts; probably some small bonus or raise. In my experience, engineers aren't rewarded greatly at a company unless they fit a certain bill or serve a certain HR/political purpose, unbeknownst to you. Such implicit biases are however, impossible to hide as they can be measured directly.

If upper management doesn't like your attitude, behavior, your looks, your race, your gender, or anything else, they can and will stop giving you opportunities. Sometimes they will treat you poorly so you leave, sometimes they'll keep you around until you do something to get fired. The latter is certainly likely if they treat you poorly. This is not only unethical, but is a normalized practice in HR.

Now, consider the case of solving deep coding problems on your own -- you're not getting paid, but you will most likely reap all of the rewards for any big wins you have, and your life isn't at the whim of internal politics that you are unaware of.

[hilbertseries]

> you're not getting paid, but you will most likely reap all of the rewards for any big wins you have

As someone that mostly enjoys optimizing distributed systems and debugging them. I can assure you that, I can’t build a product out of this skill set. There’s consulting, but then I have to continually sell myself, which I don’t enjoy. Working for a large company, I have of plenty of these problems to solve and I get paid pretty well.

[ZephyrBlu]

You could create an info product.

[Dannymetconan]

In a lot of places though you can have a good life, work 9-5, be well paid and not have to worry about all the headache that occurs from running a business.

You might not end up a millionaire but you'll generally be better paid then a lot of people in your age / social bracket.

A lot of people just don't want to make the sacrifices to run their own business!

[jshen]

If you’re a developer, and you work for a big company that gives stock options, you will almost certainly become a millionaire after 15-20 years if you don’t mismanage it.

You’re far better off, on average, this way than if you work for startups. You’re also more likely to become a millionaire this way than starting a company, but your less likely to make hundreds of millions.

[Dannymetconan]

Totally agree and your chances of actually make the 100s must be minutely small