Glassdoor/Salary.com say an experienced Google software engineer makes $150k/year (including benefits and bonuses). That'd be a big pay cut. So would paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment out there than I pay to mortgage my 4-bedroom detached house. As for "trying both", I have. I did the internship rounds while in college. Spent 6 months on the west coast with Microsoft, and a year at two smaller companies, as a full-time software engineer.

There's nothing about employment I miss. You could double the salary and I wouldn't trade lives with an employee at any of those companies. I wake up in the morning without an alarm, decide what I want to work on, program in my PJs, work as long as I care to, answer a few customer e-mails, and I'm done for the day. Some days I flip the schedule and shop/socialize/veg in the morning/afternoon, then work late at night. If I want a day or a month off, I just take it.

If I'm building something new, like the two months or so I spent on Improvely, I probably work about 4 hours a day, which is the most number of productive hours I ever got while working for someone else 8 hours a day. That's 1300 hours a year of time wasted on commutes, meetings, endless e-mails, employee reviews, forced socialization with coworkers, and kissing up to managers so you rank well for bonuses and get better projects. Ugh.

There is one downside to what I do. I'm on call to keep the servers running 24/7. That means I pay for some monitoring that can SMS me if something fails, and I carry a Surface Pro in the trunk of my car so that even if I'm away from home I can get to a computer. It's a once-a-year type responsibility. Had a hard drive crash in one server this year, and a power supply pooped out last year. Not a terrible burden.