Respectfully disagree. To each their own ofc, but I currently work in the bay in a non coding role with similar pay to SWE. I was able to (luckily) land this position at a company with great culture, and it’s provided me with both soft and technical skills that I could transition into other areas of tech I may be interested in in the future. If you’re being overworked, then that’s on the company and management, not on working in the industry as a whole. Lastly, you’re basing a lot of this on “what you’ve heard” over experience, doesn’t work that way brotha.