I’m certainly not arguing that founding a startup is a good choice, financially or otherwise. It’s super hard and you’ll likely go bust while making very little money. Just arguing against making it seem like it’s at all easy or common to earn $3-4 mil by the age of 37 in the corporate world - it really isn’t. That’s an exceptional outcome. To do that you basically need to become an insanely young executive, or to land a job as a dev at a place like Google/FB straight out of undergrad, which is also rare.

For example, this is the typical salary range for a Senior Software Engineer in Vancouver (in CAD): https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

“Big 5” salaries in SF/Seattle are way, way above what you’ll make almost anywhere else. Lots of startups are founded outside the Bay Area/Seattle, where these types of salaries don’t really exist.