I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. I think "deep" build

I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. I think "deep" building requires specific resources that having been a programmer may or may not give you. The purpose of PhD programs, in particular, is to prepare a person to do original research in an existing field. While these may have some unnecessary hazing, a significant part of their difficulty is that leaping to one's own original research or building is hard. One has to navigate avoid both excessively small steps and vacuous (or unprovable) big ideas. Someone without a PhD needs to apply some similar level of discipline imo if they're going accomplish an important thing. For a few people, that might be an easier rout but for most, I suspect it's even more difficult - at least if you honestly avoid both the trivial and vacuously ill-defined. PS: I am indeed doing the "quit job and follow what you love" thing so I think a view of how challenging that can be.