I agree with all of this, but I will say that startups can be great for fresh college grads. Not every fresh grad can land a FAANG job, and a startup might be more willing to take a chance on a smart kid with minimal experience. Once there, they'll likely wear multiple hats: everything from coding to infra to even maybe some customer support. Drinking from a firehose can be a great way to learn a lot fast, and likely with more breadth and opportunity to try new things than being SDE Level I on a 10 person team working on a single widget for a multi-widget dashboard for one of dozens of products for 'Big Corpo'.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that a 20-something also has the energy and ability to take risk. A startup folding when you're 25 with no dependents or mortgage is much different than taking that risk as a 40 y/o married father of 2.

As someone in that latter category... nah, dawg, I'll take the steady paycheck and the reasonable work hours.