If you have great ability, do t squander it. Get another job where you can be more effective. Find your passion and your fortune will likely follow.
I eschewed advice like the others give, and I didn’t have to work after 35. Yes I got lucky but I also worked hard and failed and got back up and found a place to succeed.
Big companies are mostly for drones.
For every 1 person who got a big payout, there are 99 more that just worked themselves to burnout and maybe got a mediocre options payout worth about 1/2 the salary they'd have made at BigCo.
This is probably more true if you're employee number <10 and stick with it through the long haul, which may not be appealing for a variety of reasons. It can also be true if you spin a personal project into a business, but you can do that while employed anywhere.
There isn't any guaranteed, or IMO even likely expectation of a big reward if you join SmallCo and simply "work hard". The reward for that is usually more that higher-ups recognize you're capable and choose you as the go-to person any time they have any sort of tough problem. This is both exhausting and frustrating if you're the designated hero fixer but cannot convince leadership of broader changes they need to make to limit the number of fires that need fighting or train other employees to handle tasks as effectively as you. The general rule that you'll most likely see a salary increase by hopping jobs anyway still applies.
It's an expression and promotion of inequality: only the "best" get to have a fulfilling job, everyone else has to work tech support at CVS or flip burgers at Burger King. I'm doing well because I "worked hard and failed." [1]
If you're stuck doing something lame, you're just a "drone" who wasn't smart, connected, and cool enough.
> Find your passion and your fortune will likely follow.
Will it? I'd like you to meet some very talented illustrators and graphic designers I know who still live at home or with roommates. If you've got "fortune" (never needing to work after 35), you've got luck and privilege, not passion.
Big companies pay more, give out equity that's worth something on the open market, and have better retirement and health plans. What fortune do you expect someone to find being ground down to burnout by a startup expecting 60 hour weeks with crap benefits?
I say, let's dispense with the unrealistic notion that any of us are going to "change the world" through for-profit work. We are all drones, and pretending we are not is at best going to lead to an endless cycle of chasing career fulfillment that's just out of reach.
We should strive to be happy with just existing and that means not overworking ourselves in hopes of being a part of "the next big thing." We should also strive for enough income equality so that people who didn't get lucky like you aren't suffering from overwork, poverty, and poor health outcomes.
We're born and we work and we die. Even people who "changed the world" at their company mostly just made some money for the investors. Numerically, most startup companies that have ever been founded don't exist anymore.
What was all that hustle worth for employees at GrooveShark, Vine, Pebble, or StumbleUpon? Their sweat eventually swirled right down the drain, meanwhile their peers at Microsoft are "droning" their life away at the beach right now.
I'm not saying "allow yourself to be miserable and bored at work," but I am saying that it's wrong to shame people for making this kind of tradeoff.
It's also wrong to assume that big companies don't have any interesting projects. You wouldn't want to work on Apple's chip design team? You don't think JPMorgan has any opportunities to work on software that has interesting scale and performance challenges? You think Ford has nothing interesting for a UX designer to do?
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-...