Yeah, I've been these "cool Skunkworks" teams and I literally made no more money, maybe got a $5k spot bonus (super rare), and burned myself out over a 6mo launch. Spent my entire thanksgiving week on-call putting out fires, literally every hour, while everyone else at the 800 person company was on vacation. Not a single executive or product manager involved in launching was there or checked in on things. Some moron (I hope he reads this, my nicks not anon) let us launch without connecting our credit card fraud system so we (ops, me) got slammed for an entire week with fraud server launches. Jason, you're a moron, and that's an understatement.
It's like being paid in exposure. We'll pay you in cool tech and learning!
Then you see the 20 go devs around you making the same money writing grpc services 8 hours a day home at 5 relaxing.
I'm not really sure how this relates. The story I was told had the guy working as the lead with several less experienced but still competent programmers for around 2 months. There was no crunch, burnout, or anything of the like.
You're being downvoted because most devs are blue collar and hate the idea of passionate talented devs doing something amazing quickly and effectively. Any anecdotes of small elite team success must be crushed.
It's like being paid in exposure. We'll pay you in cool tech and learning!
Then you see the 20 go devs around you making the same money writing grpc services 8 hours a day home at 5 relaxing.