&gt;You could do the same thing working at google, but instead of making $108k USD&#x2F;yr, you would make +$250k&#x2F;yr USD.<p>Not everyone can just waltz into Google. For starters, there are tens of millions of developers worldwide and only tens of thousands of total Google jobs across all roles.<p>Google, Amazon, etc. all have a well known high false positive rejection rate, so even for developers who are qualified and would do well at these companies getting in still requires a good bit of luck. Their interviews are not bias free either, so a subset of good developers are facing a process biased against them. Those with families, for instance, probably have little time for hackathons that I&#x27;m sure help with in person or phone screen coding exercises.