| I'll add another cautionary tale.... At the start of my career, I worked as a SWE at one of the FAANGs. After 3 years, I couldn't take it anymore. I hated everything I worked on, nothing was meeting my lofty expectations, and I thought about quitting constantly. Eventually I pulled the trigger to go and "do my own thing." I didn't have a backup job - instead I worked on my own projects with a cofounder and tried to turn them into a startup. We struggled mightily. We didn't raise money, and we couldn't find product market fit. Every month I was watching my bank account drain, and I wasn't drawing a salary from anywhere. The stock in my own startup was worthless. This continued for 2.5 years. Eventually, I had had enough, and I knew something had to change. I went and tried to get my old FAANG job back, but couldn't - probably due to my entitled attitude when I was there. I struggled with interviews for a couple of months, and eventually landed at a company several steps down from my old position, making about half of what I had at FAANG. About a year ago, I switched back to a different FAANG after having been at that other company for 6.5 years. Why I stayed for so many years is a long story. So ironically I'm back to where I started, but wow did I cause myself a lot of trouble. I watched for years as my old friends went on to make double and triple what I did, for doing the exact same job. In the meantime, I was more stressed out, dealing with a worse bureaucracy at a company that didn't value engineering. Leaving FAANG was something I had to do. I had to get the startup out of my system, and I couldn't continue at my original job the way that I was. You can't buy perspective, but I probably cost myself something like 1-2 million dollars in the process. Many times over the years I've questioned "Why couldn't I have just stayed at that cushy job like so many of the people that I knew?" I know there's no way that I could have given my emotional state at the time, but I can't help thinking about it. So I could tell you a bunch of lessons from my experiences, but unfortunately they're probably best learned yourself. You have to follow whatever you think is right and hope that things will work out for you. Usually they will in the long run - but the short term might be painful. |
I do believe that those kinds of jobs are the best risk-adjusted ROI if you're trying to make money. But sometimes you just need to get the startup out of your system.