Really? Are you in the Bay Area? If so, I find it hard to believe there’s not at least one startup within 10 miles of your current employer doing something at least vaguely interesting (or, at least more interesting than selling ads).

He'll have to take a large paycut to work for it though...

that's the thing; I mean, yeah, we'd all take small pay cuts for a lot of things; but dropping out of a FAANG company to one of the companies that is having a hard time hiring is a massive pay cut.

Like, for me; I'd be so happy to take a 20% (hourly) pay cut and work half-time for 40% of my current total pay and go to school the rest of the time. But as far as I can tell, the hourly paycut would be more like 50+% just on the hourly, so I'd be looking at like a quarter the total comp, and the prestige cut (and thus hit to future earnings) would be huge, as I'd have to go work for a startup/small company.

I guess this will make more sense if marginal tax rates go back up.

Sounds like you're in the perfect position to do your own startup?

More upside if it goes well and you're already not in need of money?

~= "A startup for startups sake"

The new art?

Shouldn't people usually have some kind of business idea before diving head first?

Well I'm sure as a senior dev he has some sort of idea. Certainly joining someone else's startup as a cofounder would be legit.

You have to be a senior at Google or Facebook, maybe Bing, but nowhere else would be cutting your pay for a fixed amount of experience unless you can't get an interview at Netflix

> The problem is I can't find any interesting without a large paycut.

So you're not really interested

One problem that I do have is that, although I'm prepared to take a relatively large pay cut if I'm really passionate about something, one thing I do care about is working with capable colleagues and being able to actually achieve the thing I'm passionate about. That's less likely to be the case when a job doesn't pay well, unfortunately.