"Am I the only engineer out here that wants to scream, "fuck you, pay me" whenever somebody rambels on and on about how wonderful it is to drink the kool-aid at flickr, google, twitter, or zynga? (and for the record, all of my friends at these 4 companies feel very under-paid)."<p>I'm one of those engineers that drank the kool-aid.  Yeah, I could probably make more elsewhere.  However, I'm at the stage of my career where I'm optimizing for experience, not for earnings.  I'd rather trade salary for skills now, so that those skills can bring more salary later.  That's capitalism.<p>Besides, I honestly don't see the point of going from $100K to $200K (made-up numbers, but presumably the ballpark we're talking about).  I save half my take-home pay anyway; I can't really think of what else I'd like to buy with it.  When I choose to optimize for earnings, I'd rather be in the tens of millions, i.e. found a company and grow it - which also happens to be quite satisfying, although lots of hard work.  There's a material difference between "never has to work again" and "still a wage slave".  There isn't one (to me) between "can afford a Beemer" and "can afford a Honda Civic."