I don't want to criticize too harshly, because I do think this analysis is generally good (if slightly unoriginal).
The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever.
You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle:
> I’ve told that anecdote to multiple people who didn’t think they could get a job at some trendy large company, who then ended up applying and getting in.
Waiting and hoping to "get in" is pretty weak. It implies that we're all just meat-sacks working away until some of us get lucky and manage to convince a fancy company to overpay us and let us extract a lot of value from them.
If you have value to contribute to the world (and you definitely do), then go figure out someplace where you can best contribute it. Stop worrying about the best way to take things from the world and figure out the best way put stuff in. The rest will take care of itself.
As a counterpoint, you can do an absolutely absurd amount of good with this kind of money. With a salary of 250k, you could donate 150k to charity, and still be quite well off.
I like to go by effectiveness estimates from www.givewell.org. One of the charities they approve of is GiveDirectly (www.givedirectly.org), which makes direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty. They feel confident in the claim that the average person receiving money from GiveDirectly lives on the equivalent of about $0.66 (U.S) per day[1]. GiveDirectly has an organizational overhead of about 15%.
Another charity they like, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), distributes anti-malarial bednets. The nets cost something in the ballpark of $5-6 to make and distribute[2], including organizational overhead. They make a much more tentative estimate that each $2,800 sent to the AMF results in about one life saved[3] (of a child under 5).
So, by donating 150k, you could plausibly:
1) Double the yearly income of about 531 people
(66c * 365 = $240)
($150,000 * 0.85 (efficiency) / $240) = 531
2) More tentatively, save the lives of about 53 children.
Totally agree with this. The narrative shows up in more discussions than just startup vs bigco; it's also a very common decisionmaking framework when choosing first jobs out of college, when choosing projects to work on while at the company, etc.
It's pretty bad overall for net societal productivity. The main reasons this framework shows up so much is that (i) it's hard to really think through what kind of unique value one offers and to figure out how to leverage it, and (ii) it's tough psychologically to do something that doesn't optimize for the typical value function (prestige + income).
The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever.
You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle:
> I’ve told that anecdote to multiple people who didn’t think they could get a job at some trendy large company, who then ended up applying and getting in.
Waiting and hoping to "get in" is pretty weak. It implies that we're all just meat-sacks working away until some of us get lucky and manage to convince a fancy company to overpay us and let us extract a lot of value from them.
If you have value to contribute to the world (and you definitely do), then go figure out someplace where you can best contribute it. Stop worrying about the best way to take things from the world and figure out the best way put stuff in. The rest will take care of itself.