> 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

This is probably one of the most dominant non-financial factor for engineers. Because if you want to make a visible, critical design decisions for billion-user products you usually want to be at least L6~L7, the level where you're now an owner of a non-trivial product/system spanning across teams.

Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire.

A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking.

More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.

In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.