Agreed. The article cleverly conflates &quot;not impossible&quot; with &quot;possible&quot; with &quot;probable&quot; with &quot;likely.&quot;<p>And the comments about &quot;I make &gt;$250k at GooAppBook&quot; are self-selecting, from those who didn&#x27;t get shown the door. They may not be typical for many reasons.<p>More useful questions:<p>How likely is it that a programmer of median competence&#x2F;non-laziness will make $250k after five years?<p>Conversely: how much of an exceptional workaholic do you have to be to have a reasonable chance at $250k?<p>How do the probabilities compare with those of a start-up, or a non-technical big corp, or a Wall St&#x2F;City job?<p>Also relevant is what you get to work on, how much freedom you have to choose, how research-ish it is (if that matters to you), and how much you&#x27;ll still be learning at T5.<p><i>And</i> let&#x27;s not assume big tech corps will still be big five or ten years from now. Former big tech corps - IBM, DEC, HP, etc - all looked unassailable at various times, but became very assailable within a few short years. It&#x27;s naive not to think the same couldn&#x27;t happen to the leaders today.