>You could do the same thing working at google, but instead of making $108k USD/yr, you would make +$250k/yr USD.

Not everyone can just waltz into Google. For starters, there are tens of millions of developers worldwide and only tens of thousands of total Google jobs across all roles.

Google, Amazon, etc. all have a well known high false positive rejection rate, so even for developers who are qualified and would do well at these companies getting in still requires a good bit of luck. Their interviews are not bias free either, so a subset of good developers are facing a process biased against them. Those with families, for instance, probably have little time for hackathons that I'm sure help with in person or phone screen coding exercises.

Project Euler / TopCoder help far more with the interviews than Hackathons. Hackathons are 100% useless for training for $BIGCORP interviews.

As OP said it's one thing to be financially rich, but there are other forms of wealth. The idea of working 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week (if I'm lucky), 50 weeks a year for the next 40 years just doesn't appeal to me. You are right you could earn more at Megatechcorp, but by freelancing I can work on stuff I find interesting and still live life on my terms.

Also getting into a company like Google isn't something that everyone can do, where as it's pretty easy to start freelancing (especially if you are European, hence don't need to worry about healthcare).

But I said nothing about working 40 years. I just said you could do the same thing faster working at google than being a 100k freelancer. Most freelancers I know live a pretty variable life where you get feast & famine cycles. And when it's feast time, it's long hours time. It can be more stressful than being an employee too.

You can also work pretty interesting projects at a place like google. If you want to do platform library type work, the only kinds of places your likely to get that kind of work is from a place like google or other larger companies.

I think most software engineers could get into to google if they put the effort into it. If you can make it as a $100k/yr software freelancer, you could probably study 'cracking the coding interview' and make it into google.

Also realize that google hires in europe too.

The hours isn't what you think it is. There are many 9-5ers that do good work at places like apple and google. And there are other teams that work a lot. It all depends on the team. People also get more than 2 weeks vacation too. For example, the entire engineering org at apple at least gets 3 weeks of 'mandatory' vacation. One week for thanksgiving, 2 weeks for christmas. Then you have your normal vacation on top of that.

> The idea of working 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week (if I'm lucky), 50 weeks a year for the next 40 years just doesn't appeal to me.

I used to think like that when I was 20. One thing I've learned (will be 40 soon) is that the time passes anyway.

If you're lucky, you'll get to be 60. You don't want to be poor when you're 60. Of course, you don't want to delay gratification unduly, but beware of doing the opposite.

I don't get why people (who haven't worked at these companies) think everyone works 10+ hours at these companies. I have worked at one of the big tech companies before. I probably got 6 hours of real work done per day (including meetings), the other 2 being spent eating, snacking, or dicking around.

I think what is often overlooked is that you can live in the US in a nice place and it will be cheap, at least by European standards. Assuming you can sort out visa issues.