> you're not getting paid, but you will most likely reap all of the rewards for any big wins you have

As someone that mostly enjoys optimizing distributed systems and debugging them. I can assure you that, I can’t build a product out of this skill set. There’s consulting, but then I have to continually sell myself, which I don’t enjoy. Working for a large company, I have of plenty of these problems to solve and I get paid pretty well.