Source: vegan who eats beans with 75+% of meals

I’m glad you like the beyond meat though. Good for them to have actual consistent customers for the 2x / year I end up eating it!

So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.

I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).

This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.

Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).

Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.

In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.