I've spent the first five years of my career at two FANGs, and I think the grass is greener in terms of amazing tech. Maybe I've been unlucky, but so much of my time is fighting with the enormous weight of the infrastructure to do anything. Builds, deployments, running tests, getting support from internal teams, using internal frameworks are all so stressful and unsatisfying to me. Not to mention I've never even sniffed any fun javascript framework or python work. It's been 99% Java.

Don't get me wrong--I've been lucky enough to work with and learn from some incredibly brilliant people, the work pays insanely well and lifted me from the bottom quintile to the top, and I don't have to worry about VC funding running out. But I also feel10% of the flow that I do when I'm at home cobbling together a javascript or python whatever. I understand that it isn't fair to compare my toy apps with the insane size of these companies, but still, I don't think your decision was that terrible in terms of just tech. Shoot, there are acquaintances who joined bitcoin startups when we graduated in 2015 and those people are probably worth a few million right now.

I wonder if there is anyone here who works at a unicorn and can tell me if Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc are a happier medium?