I Quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself
This story template increasingly raises conflicting and mostly negative reactions from me. It wasn&#x27;t always this way.<p>To the author&#x27;s credit, $500k in comp as an engineer is not easy. Kudos to anyone who pulls that off.<p>The reason for my reaction is this: the title can be interpreted two ways:<p>&quot;I had a great setup but I&#x27;m giving it up to take a risk.&quot;<p>&quot;I want to feel motivated again and I&#x27;m willing to give up a lot of money to do so.&quot;<p>But I increasingly dislike these posts because (1) we know there&#x27;s a strong correlation between having a lot of money and success in entrepreneurship. Starting out with a safety net is the best way to derisk! In that sense, this post is just saying &quot;I&#x27;m taking a risk after I&#x27;ve derisked it!&quot; And (2) talking about how much money you&#x27;d give up to feel motivated is pretty explicitly signalling success to other people in the &quot;I earn enough to be able to talk about it like this&quot; group. That&#x27;s just upper-middle class signalling.<p>The author&#x27;s other posts also don&#x27;t really address the elephant in the room. He was pulling in $500k. If he fails, and even if he wipes out his savings, he&#x27;s going back to pulling in more than enough money to live very comfortably while still saving enough for kids and retirement. That may feel like more risk than he&#x27;s comfortable with, but that means he&#x27;s about as derisked as it gets at a personal level. His explanation in the post titled &quot;How I set myself up financially before I took the plunge.&quot; has to do with allocating his savings to make sure he and his family are taken care of, but it doesn&#x27;t really talk about the point that he at any point can choose to go back to earning more than enough money. That&#x27;s a privilege that very few people have. He certainly earned that privilege, but how many entrepreneurs can say &quot;I&#x27;m setting aside $1m of my liquid money to bootstrap a startup&quot;?<p>If the author had left the money out, it would have been a great post about searching for motivation, which we all struggle with, but I think the money aspect undermines the point.