Downsides to working at a tech giant

What I meant however was a bit meta: those who are deeply cut for entrepreneurship and startups are not motivated by money first or even at all; they thus don't and shouldn't care about statistics aiming at maximizing personal benefit... to a founder, "personal benefit" is more about getting things done, creating the dream. They'd rather optimize for long-term success (the kind that's much harder to take away from you, that creates real value).

Wealth, personal or collective, is but a consequence of a successful economic endeavor. As an employee, you'd choose to work for a startup because there's something in it that corporations money can't buy for you. There's no bet if you already believe in the work, you will get what you want every single day on the job. Different values, different goals, different rewards for different people I guess.

And not playing the Mega Millions Jackpot lotto cost me $1.6 billion. I had the opportunity to pick the winning numbers, but instead, I didn't even play! What a chump I was.

Don't make my mistakes.

I suppose the real problem is that some genuine startup-oriented personality may be dissuaded from working on one, but perhaps the cultural force against them is in the range where it should dissuade someone who isn't more wholly convinced that they know a truth that others do not believe in.

I think it may be counter-productive to attempt to convince people who prefer aiming for the safe money. I think that while attempting to draw a line hits the Sorites paradox really fast, there is quite clearly a difference between someone with your world-view and someone who runs the math on total compensation alone. I think the person with the latter view will not recreate the OP experience because all the choices are very non-independent. The same person who'll take the low-variance high-expected-value out of school will do the same the next time they're faced with a choice and again and again and again ad inf. They provide the selective pressure of optimizing for 'exploit' (in the explore/exploit sense) while the startup-type folks provide the selective pressure of predation.

0: For instance in the geeks/mops/sociopaths view https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I'm calling BS on this. The empathy fairy doesn't bless you just for working at a startup, just like it doesn't disappear when you work for big tech. You have to actually create and nurture empathy yourself. You have to engage in the work: learning about the products, all the people you've never met that build things you didn't know existed, how all of it eventually becomes a thing for a customer to use, and how to make it better. In that process, you learn to care about things you didn't before.

Can you "directly solve" a problem for customers in a big company? Sometimes. But more often, you have to work together with other people to solve it. You have to use initiative, talk to people, coordinate things, lead initiatives. It's more work. And because it's more work, it's even more rewarding when you solve something. You may have even improved a lot more than the original problem in the process.

Be patient. I’ll respond to the other post if you wait.