Well, ultimately it's about the advice here. If someone asks you how to achieve financial independence and you tell them to just make half a mil working at FAAN

Well, ultimately it's about the advice here. If someone asks you how to achieve financial independence and you tell them to just make half a mil working at FAANG, your advice is going to get filed under the "no shit" folder. I also don't quite follow how the author claims to have achieved financial independence while relying on a $600K/yr salary from Amazon. This isn't the type of content folks usually expect. I think for most people it'll be about using their salaries to their potential via smart investing and compounding, while focusing their free time on generating alternative streams of income which will supplement their existing salary. I think this is the foundation of most "financial independence" stories. With that said, I do think that the article is very inspirational to most engineers on here. I'm a fellow immigrant who has achieved a bit in my life in the US, but not nearly as much in terms of salary. I'm still grateful and very content knowing that the ceiling is as high as I pretty much want it to be.