[mil22]

Going out on your own may not be always strictly better or more rewarding, but this founder story is just one datapoint. Since most companies have an employee equity pool that is sized at only 10-20%, working for them is by definition giving 80-90% of the value you create away to the founders and investors. The rewards of either starting a company or being a sole proprietor (e.g. indie dev or consultant), can therefore be expected to be very substantial, on average, perhaps even 5-10x per unit time worked, and that's not including the secondary non-financial benefits of not working for someone else (e.g. freedom, autonomy, etc.). I do wish more people were aware of this principle, because the willingness of engineers in the aggregate to acquiesce to 10-20% ownership is why VCs and founders become so inappropriately rich by comparison. Just my 2c.