My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

This shows that going out on your own is not always strictly better or more rewarding. As a software engineer you can simply rent your skills and be part of a bigger team and company that's arguably doing something more impactful than building widgets.

The finances work out better too. Market salary as a software engineer is easily in the 200-300k range and increases over time with experience and skill. You can also more easily cap your work hours at 30-40 hours a week especially if you're remote. Then if you can figure out a way to do that while living in Southeast Asia, it's hard to imagine quality of life getting better than that as you're now living like a king and should be able to save as much as 50% of your income and retire young.

Going out on your own may not be always strictly better or more rewarding, but this founder story is just one datapoint. Since most companies have an employee equity pool that is sized at only 10-20%, working for them is by definition giving 80-90% of the value you create away to the founders and investors. The rewards of either starting a company or being a sole proprietor (e.g. indie dev or consultant), can therefore be expected to be very substantial, on average, perhaps even 5-10x per unit time worked, and that's not including the secondary non-financial benefits of not working for someone else (e.g. freedom, autonomy, etc.). I do wish more people were aware of this principle, because the willingness of engineers in the aggregate to acquiesce to 10-20% ownership is why VCs and founders become so inappropriately rich by comparison. Just my 2c.