This is the part I think young people don't understand. My husband and I worked around 16 years combined in tech. We started pretty late, since we both have PhDs, and we're not engineers so we aren't making top of the market. We still had enough money after that time to buy a house, have 2 kids and go on a multi-year sabbatical. And most of this working period was not at FAANGs.
If you're young, talented, single and bringing home $200k a year including RSUs, you are on track to basically do whatever you want in a decade. Make it to senior manager / Staff level and you should be clearing $400k a year at least. And if you do it smartly you're working 9-5, not some 996 bullshit. That's a ridiculous amount of money.
It's not as sexy as building a startup. But at least for me the ROI has been incredible. And I'm not super smart- my whole college career I looked down at people who spent their lives in front of a computer. I completely missed the trend of tech and Silicon Valley, and I definitely don't work any harder than the next guy. But if you do good work I've found that it tends to pay off.
