Last month I walked away from a $200K salary at a FAANG company. My manager thought I was crazy. My parents thought I was having a breakdown. My friends thought I'd lost my mind.
They were all wrong.
The Golden Handcuffs
$200K sounds like a lot. And it is — until you realize what it costs:
- 60-hour weeks minimum
- Meetings about meetings about meetings
- Code reviews that take longer than writing the code
- Performance reviews where "exceeds expectations" means "meets expectations"
- On-call rotations that destroy your weekends
I was trading my life for money I didn't have time to spend.
The Breaking Point
It wasn't one thing. It was everything:
- Spending 3 hours in a "alignment meeting" that could've been a Slack message
- Watching a 6-month project get cancelled because "strategic priorities shifted"
- Getting a 3% raise while the company posted record profits
- Realizing I hadn't learned anything new in 2 years
The money wasn't worth the misery.
What I Did Instead
I started my own thing. Small. Lean. No investors. No board meetings. No "synergy" discussions.
Month 1: $0 revenue. Pure panic.
Month 3: $2K revenue. Cautious optimism.
Month 6: $8K revenue. I might actually survive this.
Month 12: $15K revenue. I'm never going back.
The Real Cost of a "Good" Job
Here's what nobody tells you about high-paying engineering jobs:
| What You Think You're Getting | What You're Actually Getting |
|---|---|
| Financial security | Lifestyle inflation |
| Career growth | Resume padding |
| Work-life balance | Work-life integration (work all the time) |
| Learning opportunities | Meetings about learning opportunities |
What I Learned
Your salary is not your worth. I'm worth more at $15K/month working 20 hours than $200K/year working 60.
Corporate engineering is theater. Most of the work is convincing people you're working, not actually working.
The best engineers I know are building their own things. Not optimizing ad click-through rates.
Time is the only non-renewable resource. You can't buy more hours. You can only spend them.
Should You Quit?
Maybe. Maybe not. But ask yourself:
- Would you do this job for free?
- Are you learning or just earning?
- What would you do with 40 extra hours per week?
- What's the worst that could happen if you tried?
The answer to that last question is usually "I'd have to get another job." Which you can always do.
What's your story? Did you leave a "good" job for something better? Or are you still trapped in the golden handcuffs?
Top comments (1)
The $200K salary isn't the cost. The $200K salary plus the meetings, the context switching, and the politics is the cost.
I know a senior engineer making $220K. He spends 4 hours a day in meetings. 2 hours in Slack. 1 hour in "alignment sessions."
That leaves 1 hour for actual engineering. At $220K/year, that's $550/hour for actual coding.
A $120K engineer who ships full-time? $60/hour. 10x cheaper per useful hour.
The real cost isn't the salary. It's the overhead.