I would love to see Patrick address the fact that he now works as an eng manager at Stripe, in the context of a lot of his previous writing like this piece.
For all he has written about side projects and building sustainable lifestyle businesses, I bet he makes more in a single year now than he ever did from any of those projects. Not that that negates his previous advice at all, it’s great that people can figure out a way to make a good living by minimizing their work hours, or not having an employer, or whatever makes them happiest.
And maybe I am projecting based on my own journey a little bit, but it sounds like the place he was at in his own life 5-10 years ago and his bad experiences some pretty toxic Japanese megacorps, probably made him overly pessimistic on the prospects of a 9-5 tech job in general.
But the opportunities that arose over the past decade, and appear to still exist for the foreseeable future, at large public or nearly public tech cos are just incredible in terms of the level of return employees can get for relatively low risk. And I think most young people starting out still don’t fully realize this. The numbers you see on levels.fyi are very real, and on top of that these stocks have been doubling every few years. You can pretty reliably, say, work hard for 20 years and then retire at age 40 with 10 million dollars in savings. For the vast majority of people, there’s just no way a side hustle can compete with that. Any theoretical arguments about labor vs capital don’t really make sense for the top paid 1% of labor.