>1. Work for a FAANG or adtech for 70 hours per week with a toxic manager on optimizing the psychological weapons and dark patterns they use to keep their users in a negative feedback cycle of dependence on their increasingly shitty and hostile products
Say what you want about the morality of working for them, but almost no one is working 70 hours there and the true .1% engineers are making multiple $M per year so the tradeoff may be worth it.
>3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match)
If you are just selling your labor as a butt in a seat then yes this is true. I know solo tech consultants making 200k/mo because they moved up in the meta chain and sell strategy to CTOs.
>4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
This is just fantasy.
>'ve chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
I think you have a warped view of reality and frankly of the value of expertise. There are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc. I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people. At the minimum they aren't as cynical and defeatist as you and know how to market their abilities.
Say what you want about the morality of working for them, but almost no one is working 70 hours there and the true .1% engineers are making multiple $M per year so the tradeoff may be worth it.
>3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match)
If you are just selling your labor as a butt in a seat then yes this is true. I know solo tech consultants making 200k/mo because they moved up in the meta chain and sell strategy to CTOs.
>4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
This is just fantasy.
>'ve chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
I think you have a warped view of reality and frankly of the value of expertise. There are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc. I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people. At the minimum they aren't as cynical and defeatist as you and know how to market their abilities.