But I said nothing about working 40 years.  I just said you could do the same thing faster working at google than being a 100k freelancer.  Most freelancers I know live a pretty variable life where you get feast &amp; famine cycles.  And when it&#x27;s feast time, it&#x27;s long hours time.  It can be more stressful than being an employee too.<p>You can also work pretty interesting projects at a place like google.  If you want to do platform library type work, the only kinds of places your likely to get that kind of work is from a place like google or other larger companies.<p>I think most software engineers could get into to google if they put the effort into it.  If you can make it as a $100k&#x2F;yr software freelancer, you could probably study &#x27;cracking the coding interview&#x27; and make it into google.<p>Also realize that google hires in europe too.<p>The hours isn&#x27;t what you think it is.  There are many 9-5ers that do good work at places like apple and google.  And there are other teams that work a lot.  It all depends on the team.  People also get more than 2 weeks vacation too.  For example, the entire engineering org at apple at least gets 3 weeks of &#x27;mandatory&#x27; vacation.  One week for thanksgiving, 2 weeks for christmas.  Then you have your normal vacation on top of that.