Sure, but the odds aren&#x27;t 10% or 40%, they&#x27;re more on the order of 1% to 3%. If you can pick winners at a 40% rate, you&#x27;re doing orders of magnitude better than even the top VCs in the industry, and your talent is worth billions.<p>Realistically nobody plays at those odds, the actual odds being played are much, much lower.<p>Which also means that, even through a long career, you&#x27;re not taking on enough jobs to get a reasonable shot at a win - 10 jobs with a 2% chance of winning each aren&#x27;t good odds - you have a 18% chance of scoring a win.<p>All the while you&#x27;re giving up a lot of money to do so - BigCo&#x27;s will pay you easily $100-200k more <i>per year</i>. So even if you switch jobs yearly, 10 jobs = 10 years = $1-2M on the table to play for 18% odds.<p>Which is also why investors who are able to choose well win - YC for example invests in over 200 companies a year. Unless you&#x27;re switching jobs every week you&#x27;re not going to be able to raise N high enough to make a difference - at YC&#x27;s scale a 2% chance of winning for each company means there&#x27;s a 98% chance at least one company wins.<p>The entire idea here is that nobody has predictive power high enough to the degree of 10% vs. 40%. Realistically when choosing between two competing startups you&#x27;re choosing success odds in the low single digits.<p>Not to mention the rash of articles in the past week about the low payouts you&#x27;re likely to get even if the company succeeds. Engineers don&#x27;t walk away from modern startups with 7-figure payouts, low 6-figures is more likely. So realistically even if you are able to pick companies at a 40% accuracy (again, astronomically higher than reality) your expected payout is lower than the $1-2M you&#x27;re leaving on the table in order to play.