Comment by darth_avocado

I am 100% in the same boat. Had a recruiter reach out to me who wanted me to leave my more than comfortable six figure SV job to do cutting edge contract work in machine learning as a lead engineer for about $50/hour. I was so amused I actually spent the time listening to their pitch and eventually told them that anything less than $200/hour wouldn't even cover my current pay + benefits. Let me know if you can do better. They hung up. Lol