| I work as a salaried employee. This is largely because I'm neither good at marketing & networking nor have a tremendous desire to be, as well as having lived for a long time in a place with no meaningful tech industry. I would like to operate my own side business, but to date those projects have demanded more time than I have available. In the long term, I'd like to obtain a PhD and consult in areas related to that, working remotely. I also want to remark that, given careful choice of employers & their IP agreements, there's nothing stopping you from pursuing your dreams at home. Your salary might be paid for someone else's dream to come true, but it's also funding your life and dreams. Every now and then a startup hits the jackpot - say, every one out of a few hundred. As a non-founder, you probably won't become wealthy this way. Even founders get messed over a good deal. This is well documented and understood. So if your dream is to become wealthy, being an employee developer is not the way to go. You will need to gain significant equity. If your dream is to build amazing product, you probably need to look for a midsize company who does that sort of thing but isn't large enough to have seized up into cash cow milking. At the end of the day (i.e., when you look back on it in ten years), very few businesses are amazing, innovative, and tremendous: they exist to provide services & goods to help other people's lives get along all right & maybe improve their lives a bit. final ninja-edit: This is not a bad thing, to do good work for reasonable pay. There is great dignity in doing so, regardless of whether you make someone else rich or yourself rich, or simply holding a steady state in the world. Being able to provide for yourself & yours, giving back more than you take, is an honorable thing not to be despised. |