Comment by erubin

I like Ben's writing a lot but I think he's not very familiar with just how much better FAANG is in expectation value for your typical engineer - i.e. at current compensation levels it would be possible to achieve financial independence by 35 or 40 for somebody joining out of college. I don't think Ben has a particularly steep utility curve for money so working at a mission-driven startup is probably great for him, but the landscape out there has changed since he was last looking for work.