Not at all. Most people can be super happy with less than the average tech salary (at a point where they don't feel they need more if it comes at the expense of work life balance, time with family, job satisfaction, etc).

A junior or "mid" who doesn't take guidance repeatedly should likely be managed out.

It's perfectly fine remain "mid" (not junior IMHO) but is not ok to ignore guidance and advice from more experienced team members.

It's funny cuz is true. Except it'd probably be one long design doc with 10 rounds of review, 15 CLs (PRs) and months of rollouts later ... fails A/B due to declining user engagement.

Yes. Once is available more widely to common car owners (either from Waymo or others) that would interest me. Current Tesla supervised style semi autonomous driving I would find either boring or stressful (depending on the scenario). I would rather drive myself.

Note Waymo announced a partnership with Toyota, pretty hand wavy, but at least it seems there’s hope the technology may come to regular car owners at some point.

Quite frankly sounds super boring. I prefer driving than supervising. Only true unsupervised autonomous driving would be interesting for me (e.g Waymo).