Or for one of the tens of thousands of non-faang/non-startup businesses out there paying good money with actual work/life balance.

As a side note, I personally find it hilarious to associate work/life balance with a startup.

If you're a FANG-caliber candidate, the pool of startups you can work for have good work/life balance, high pay, and are pretty awesome. In general though you are of course right.

I left GOOG a year ago to join MSFT, both have excellent work-life balance.

I also spent 5 years at a well known startup that went public - I think I averaged nearly 12 hours a day over the 5 years there.

In my experience and from a lot of people I talk to, work-life balance is much better at a large Corp than a startup.

Are startups any better? From what I have seen it's, "work for low wages in a high stress environment, and pray we go public in 5 years".

Top tier yes, mid to low tier no

..or government work.

I get to do meaningful work, and my employer REALLY cares about me (the amount of training we get offered is amazing). UK so YMMV.

Very true. I worked for the DoD for a few years and it's definitely a good job to e.g. settle down and have a family and work for 50 years at with good job security, benefits, etc.

I moved too from DoD to FANG, and I’m not sure how you can say this with a straight face. Nothing FANG does on its worst day is comparable to what DoD does on its best day.

That’s not to say the DoD is inherently evil from the bottom up. It’s just that the things activists love to hate about FANG (potentially contributing to border control, selling technologies to foreign governments, data collection), the DoD does ten times over.

Yeah that's very true for a large portion of the DoD. In my case I was doing theoretical research that was all getting published and pushing the AI field forward. People doing applied research get their stuff used for all sorts of unsavory stuff though.