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I am the same age as them, make more money, live in a more pleasant place (i.e. not an overpriced West Coast city), and have a lot more free time and freedom.
I did this by working at (or starting) boring lifestyle software companies that sell for $10-100M.
I'm actually convinced that software engineering at FAANG > 95% of non FAANG software engineering roles. Its not just the compensation, the systems and infrastructure are nice to use. You don't spend nearly as much time mucking around with broken open source components.
That's true...big companies just have that infrastructure thing ironed out. There's bureaucracy (like having to get security to sign off on some new software), but there is also support. It's not FAANG but I work at Disney and a question came up about transferring 8K video files back and forth between documentary filmmakers and editors who are now working remotely due to covid. Before going down the rabbit hole of researching options to get it done, we got Pixar on the phone to see how they do it. That would have been tougher at a plucky startup.
Later, when my manager joined the program too I got to demo the Fire Phone for him. I could see disappointment in his face as he asked me - "Will you use this phone when it comes out?" I told him no. And he said "Maybe if they give it to you for free?" I turned the question back to him and he thought for a moment and said "No." I agreed.
There was a meeting where the business people told us how good we were doing, what the schedule was, how our partners at the carrier loved the phone and how the users they surveyed loved it too. Someone asked
"What build were they using?" And a lot of people laughed like it was a joke. But I detected the hint of earnestness in the asker. He, like me, was just kind of confused at what he was hearing and trying to figure it out.
Every project I worked at Amazon was like this and I worked on quite a few. Crushing, depressing failures that everyone I worked with saw coming. But also, it didn't effect our careers negatively at all.
There's a disconnect between your output and your career. You can deliver features on some program that never sees the light of day or is simply an embarrassing failure for your entire career. And, it doesn't matter because somewhere in the company is an effectively infinite money generator which will keep you and your colleagues well compensated even though, realistically, there would be no difference between you working hard and you doing nothing at all.
By the time I quit Amazon I was so deadened by the feeling of contributing nothing and meaning nothing despite working quite hard I just started to let things go. I refused to read my email as a general principle. I'd sometimes respond on Chime. I'd go out on day trips and just check my phone once or twice all day. My productivity dropped off to zero as I just didn't care any more.
Internally, I felt this conflict between being a brazen parasite - intentionally not working but still getting paid, and feeling like I had always been a parasite - working on stupid projects and getting paid because of the lucrative ones I had no part in. After a couple months it got to be too much and I just told my boss I was quitting. He actually persuaded me to stay on a couple more months to help with the transition and to wrap up some of my tasks. Well, I was more persuaded by the chance to let a little more stock vest, but still...
It's not all bad. I found the experience quite lucrative and I don't need to work for the foreseeable future. I did find it kind of soul deadening though.
I'm actually convinced that software engineering at FAANG > 95% of non FAANG software engineering roles. Its not just the compensation, the systems and infrastructure are nice to use. You don't spend nearly as much time mucking around with broken open source components.
I was recently frustrated with a poor quality open sourced FAANG library. At one point the error message was something like "Successful: operation failed."
There are also the cases where services are just built on open source components, then branded.
I have much preferred working and integrating with open source components, as when something goes wrong, at least you can see what is happening.
Focus. One of the FAANG culture diseases is to do a lot of engineering work of dubious to negative value. Doing NIH versions of popular open source projects or migrating and replacing stuff that works fine with stuff that works at best a little worse. When engineering time is more scarce, you’re more likely to be doing something important.
1) Dealing with climbing the corporate ladder, covering your ass from backstabbers, and all sorts of company politics are bad enough to deal with in fairly small companies where you might have a handful of business relationships to deal with, let alone in mega-corporations where you might be working in one small project department with dozens and dozens of people and several layers of managers.
2) Big companies have essentially become centers for identity politics, not sitting down and writing code and solving creative problems. Somehow good things like being kind to all and treating everybody as you'd want to be treated have morphed into (mostly people who have infiltrated HR departments) preaching anti-whiteness and anti-male hatred. I do some consulting for companies and have been put on a handful of their internal mailing lists so I directly see what kind of racist filth goes out to the actual employees.
For me, it's 2 big reasons. 1) Dealing with climbing the corporate ladder, covering your ass from backstabbers, and all sorts of company politics are bad enough to deal with in fairly small companies where you might have a handful of business relationships to deal with, let alone in mega-corporations where you might be working in one small project department with dozens and dozens of people and several layers of mana…
As somebody very skeptical of this characterization but that admittedly does not work in FAANG I would love to see a copy and pasted example.
My relatives work at Amazon and Netflix. None of them have time for anything other than work. The culture at those places seems unbelievably toxic. I am the same age as them, make more money, live in a more pleasant place (i.e. not an overpriced West Coast city), and have a lot more free time and freedom. I did this by working at (or starting) boring lifestyle software companies that sell for $10-100M.