This is very true. I come from a non-tech (humanities/academia) background and was entirely self-taught when I decided to switch careers. I had only done very s

This is very true. I come from a non-tech (humanities/academia) background and was entirely self-taught when I decided to switch careers. I had only done very specific and quite unmarketable hobby projects on outdated technologies (win32 Assembly, Pascal, Fortran and some PHP/MySQL) and there was no way I would have had a shot at getting a job at any tech corp, let alone a FAANG. Startups, on the other hand, were hungry for talent. The pay I got at my first job wasn't great, even by startup standards. But it got me working on a more up-to-date stack (JS, Go, Python, Scala, NoSQL DBs...), taught me how to better handle the tradeoffs between clean, robust code and fast shipping and got me a great network. A few years later, I got no equity, my salary is only decent (nothing FAANG-level, but better than friends at some larger corps) but I like what I do, got a fancy title, manage people and am considered indispensable enough that I can make my own hours. I've met a large number of people from similarly non-traditional backgrounds as mine (former nurse, geology PhD, classical musician...) in the startup scene and my guess is they would never had a shot at working in tech if it were not for startups.