This reminds me of a slide I saw at some talk. It was presented as a totem pole, and your goal is to move up on the pole. It was called the "TKVP Totem Pole", f

This reminds me of a slide I saw at some talk. It was presented as a totem pole, and your goal is to move up on the pole. It was called the "TKVP Totem Pole", from bottom to top: Vision Product Knowledge Time What do you get paid for on this stack? IF you are selling your time by the hour (and billing honestly) you are at the bottom of the pole -- T. The next step up is to be paid more for your knowledge (wisdom, expertise) than for your time. P is for product: at this point, we are talking about a startup, rather than a role at a company. At the base of things, most viable startups grow out of the experience of spending time and applying knowledge to customer's problems. When you find yourself (say as a consultant, or even job-hopping every 1.5 years) solving the same puzzles again and again, you might start to think about automating, consolidating, productizing these patterns and selling them to customers as a product or service. Even an IC at a FAANG can do this by, for example, convincing their manager to open-source useful utilities. Guess what -- now you can re-use that code at your next job! At the top of the totem pole is Vision. That is where (as a startup founder) you sell the vision of what your product/service could become, if you had some rocket fuel in the form of capital and networking support. Of course this climb is not for everyone to take solo. As a talented IC, you may decide that instead of the safety of a FAANG job, you might consider throwing your chips in with a startup that has ascended this ladder to somewhere between P and V. Just make sure you get an equity package that fairly compensates you for the career risk you are taking.