My only advice is to get your finances together and have a giant ball of "FU" money so you can afford to quit situations where you're wasting your time. Software engineers have the luxury of making large sums of money, so it shouldn't take too long to get a few hundred K together. Things start to look much more rosy after that.

Just remember to think like a business person. They're doing that. Why not you?

Saving "A few 100k" is one solution, probably for the American FAANG (or equivalent) engineers. But there are other solutions.

Frugality helps - less money is required if you live in a shared house or a couch (you can invest in property at the same time but not live in it).

Having a life partner helps, one of you can have a job at all times, so one of you has the FU card.

Other sources of income. I think coding side projects are hard to make work, but real estate is more doable (but there is more risk and patience required).

Even with none of that, a good CV, interviewing technique, keeping up with the interview puzzles, and living somewhere with plenty of jobs will give you a FU card to your current company (but not the industry).

Oh for sure! There are so many different FU cards, money being the obvious one