I appreciate your perspective. ultimately im going to start a family soon and I want to try my hand at starting something and building my skills since i felt like i was stagnating where I was at. I'm trying to build something in a totally separate industry and I think we might have our first few customers which is exciting! But not sure it'll pay the bills long term.

Also, I was still expected to produce work at stripe, the work was more like speculative or validation documents instead of building or maintaining systems. Of lot of work proposing things that never got built or adhoc supporting other teams. On top of that perf season was still tiring because i had to justify my existence even though I didn't really know what I was doing or how i was adding value. I got paid well while i was there and still hold my stripe stock but i wasn't really an engineer by the end of it.

I'm happy to retire at google when i have a few kids (if its still around) in like 10-15 years. Gotta shoot my shot while I have energy.