High variance strategy: cofound a startup or be the first engineering hire at a startup. Work your ass off and hope that the startup becomes a mid-sized company

High variance strategy: cofound a startup or be the first engineering hire at a startup. Work your ass off and hope that the startup becomes a mid-sized company. You'll need to scale along with the company - in the early days you'll be writing a ton of code, but once the company is "mid-sized" your role is going to be managing people. As someone else mentioned, if at that point you're still coding either you're a terrible CTO or you're working for a terrible company (or both). :)