> And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams.

Like, let's be clear. The vast majority of this money was in stock, which was pushed upwards by the incredibly low interest rates we've had since the GFC. Those days are gone (for a while at least), and the likelihood is that most of these people have taken 50% pay cuts this year due to this.

And it's also worth noting that these people are a very very small proportion of the total workforce at tech companies, and many of them are kept on hand because they are really good at things that are difficult to hire for (how much is someone who deeply understands a GBM implementation used in the ads system worth to FB/GOOG)?