Yes and go where? Google, Facebook and Amazon are laying off people and it would be crazy to work for one of the many non profitable private or public tech compabies.
And that doesn’t include meaningless “equity” in a private company.
Or you could take a tiny pay cut but go 100% remote and move wherever you want in the world
Another thing to consider is that most companies are working on much easier stuff than the type of problems you face at a company like Microsoft. My first tech job, we had an ex-Microsoftie there. The dude basically just sat around surfing the web all day, worked maybe 4 hours total between Monday and Friday. He was still the most productive person at the whole company, and he taught us all a lot in the process.
That’s not meant to be an insult. I spent over 2 decades as your average CRUD developer and only fell into BigTech in 2020 because I added cloud to my toolbelt
Now I wouldn’t have move from my big house in the Atlanta burbs where I was making $160K for the mid 200s. And the only reason I was even interested in my current job was that it was permanently remote.
…great people don’t want to be held back by average people.