Comment by austenallred

I don’t think it’s crazy to say that a line of code written at Google will, risk adjusted and averaged across all lines of code written at Google, create more value for society than the risk adjusted and averaged line of code at a random startup.

But in startups averages don’t matter as much - it has power-law style returns, so if you happen to work at an insanely valuable startup those lines of code might be 1,000x as valuable as the average line of code written at Google.

Ergo, if you can/want to play the odds with those kind of risks you go to a startup, even knowing the risk adjusted value is lower (loving your work also matters, and some prefer startups - myself included). If you want a sure thing you go to Google.