What about the alternative of building up wealth? It's the conservative view, but if you get to 30 or 40 with significant assets, you have a lot more flexibility to explore what you want without worrying about money. With the supply demand curve favoring devs for the time being, why not jump from job to job taking the compensation increase each time? I think my 2-3 year stints will catch up to me at some point, but if I have 1-2m in liquid assets, I think I'll have a much wider set of means than if I had optimized for experience. You'll still fail and learn, but you'll be sitting on cash instead of worthless options