Not really, I rather be paid less but work remote and have more freedom with my time and where I work.
To be explicit, you're saying the only metric that matters (when we're ranking software engineers) is how well-paid a software engineer is?
When we're discussing income, that seems reasonable.
people working on new systems and tech are generally better programmers than people hacking away at enterprise spaghetti at a big corp. big corp jobs like that pay better for less work though.
To be fair - that's not the point he was making. As we were discussing income - that's the only metric that matters in the discussion at hand.