All three things I listed have free (as in beer and speech) alternatives that don't employ the SaaS model.
Strivers are amazing human beings. It's okay to be a striver that works at Google. It's okay to build logging tools. We'll need those things in the future, too.
We all learn our lessons in different orders and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Joking aside, it’s true that some folks have lives that require 350k liquid comp. If that’s you, staying at a cushy role in FAANG might be the right call. But for tons of brilliant people that’s not the case.
(Also not sure if it matters but I vouched for this after it was flagged. I doubt many YC founders [or PG] would be offended by this. It's clearly in jest.)
This is just propaganda trivializing programming. Unfortunately all other professions put themselves on a pedestal whereas programmers constantly are self deprecating their profession.
But how are we supposed to make money without proprietary software or SaaS? People always say "it's free as in freedom, not free as in zero price" but in practice, free software usually is free as in zero price. I guess you can work for a company that will pay you to write free software or be sponsored to write free software, but outside of that, it seems pretty difficult to monetize ethically pure software.
If they're not interested in generating income, Open Source is typically the next stop.