If you're a good engineer you can make it. These days there are so many wannabes trying to get into "startups" as a career move. They are encouraged and preye

If you're a good engineer you can make it. These days there are so many wannabes trying to get into "startups" as a career move. They are encouraged and preyed upon by the bootcamps and the general anti-credentialist counter-culture that has come from Silicon Valley's roots. They are even founding companies and getting funding because there's so little places for capital to go these days everybody and their mother in the 1% is looking to become an angel investor since it seems perhaps a little less risky than rolling their dice with Goldman Sachs or whatever other shark wants to use them as a pawn at the top of the financial food chain. But if you come out as a solid programmer with good technical sense and enough seasoning to figure out existing systems and work on them without introducing a maintenance nightmare down the line, that will be recognized and rewarded. If you are good at what you do and professional the only one who will look down their nose at you for working a solid 9-5 are fools and megalomaniacs—most of whom are destined to flame out spectacularly without ever having built anything of value.