I generally agree with the other Ryan’s feedback.
I’ve been very lucky/fortunate/successful, so it’s hard to call it a pay cut, but giving up FANG RSU’s 15 years ago hurt, and in general engineers make more than non-engineers.
It was definitely worth it to me because I enjoy the work I do much more. It’s still technical but I get to make business decisions (and pre-pandemic, travel to great places). I work with a lot of project managers but don’t have to do too much PM, which I find a bit dull and not a good match to my skills. I prefer creative thinking and problem solving (with some analysis mixed in) to highly structured work.
It’s easy to say when you’ve got the benefit of privilege (good schools, financial safety net), but I was able to choose to focus on the work I liked and be good at them, and the other parts fell into place.
All that said, multiple times a year since graduating I talk to engineering colleagues about getting an MBA and I almost always advise against getting one. It’s not a good financial decision. If you know what you want to do and are at a good company, figure out a way to pivot to that role eg as an engineer work on projects that are more customer facing, or closer to the product, or closer to analytics, rather than going deeper into SRE or architecture. Why spend $300-500K in lost wages and fees to learn to be a PM if you can be paid to figure out how to do it?
The exception to that is if you want to be a VC. Then it makes to get a Stanford MBA, if you can get in.