From a purely objective standpoint, working at Big Tech and saving every possible cent until you have like 1-2 years worth of expenses saved up, is the most optimal strategy. You end up with a lot of flexibility so you can try different things if you feel burned out.<p>From a psychological point of view, fulfillment usually comes from doing something that is challenging, which means that the challenge has to align with what you perceive as value, which is a very personal thing. If work takes up a significant chunk of your time and energy, but its something that you don't see as valuable, you are probably going to burn out.<p>However, depending on your skill level and ability to figure out how to move internally to better teams, big tech work can be very easy, which means you aren't going to get burned out, which gives you both money and time to do things that are valuable.<p>For example, I used to work in Amazon, standard team that owned a few backend services. I dunno if it was just me, but I never had a hard time implementing features in fraction of the time that everyone else did, mostly because I knew and understood things beyond code (like for example, nobody on my team even knew that you could capture traffic with tcpdump and see the json request and responses directly). So as a result, I only did about 6 hours of actual work per week, but my "output" was the same or greater than teammates. Never got burnt out. My current job is pretty much the same pay, just actually part time contractually, because I really wanted to focus on improving my fitness for longevity which takes a bunch of dedicated planning and training - and this is the part that is challenging for me that I also find great value in.