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 k

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.