And thats the reason I would stop my yonger-self from doing software.
When compared to other careers after, say, 15 years of experience you are not well established high paying position as a lawyer or an engineer (the actual kind :) )
After 15 years you are out-of-date dev that didn't find a time to do their job, manage family and friend and have a side projects to keep up to date with technology.
This is a bit overdramatic but sw devs are expected to ride the wave all the way through their careers when other career paths offer stability and protectionism of well established fields.
What about the half million total comp and the part where you can retire in your thirties? If anything, I bet younger me would do even better than I did if he were to start today.
Sure. I bet those vocal people would be happy to explain in detail what they did to get those jobs.
It’s not easy, and you may need to actually go to the place where those jobs are. But each of those companies will hire thousands of people at those compensation level in the next year. And the people they hire were in no way exceptional (or different to you) before they started down the path to getting where they are now.
No need to buy "their book on how to get those jobs" or anything like that.
To get the interview, you just gotta have some years of experience, some side projects, and that's about it. If you went to a top tier school or something like that, you don't even need the years of experience. Getting an interview at those companies is the easy part, pretty much everyone I went to college with got an interview with one of those companies before graduating (and I didn't go to some super known ivy league college, it was just a pretty good public school in Georgia). The issue was that most people didn't pass those interviews.
To pass the interview, read up on systems design, read up on algorithms, practice some leetcode/hackerrank/etc., and you are good to go. All of those resources can be easily obtained for free. There is no secret or trick to any of that.
When compared to other careers after, say, 15 years of experience you are not well established high paying position as a lawyer or an engineer (the actual kind :) )
After 15 years you are out-of-date dev that didn't find a time to do their job, manage family and friend and have a side projects to keep up to date with technology.
This is a bit overdramatic but sw devs are expected to ride the wave all the way through their careers when other career paths offer stability and protectionism of well established fields.