I used to be a founder and got burned out when building my last company.
I'm now working at a dysfunctionnal 300+ppl company as a freelance developer.
I've been in full remote since before the pandemic, I'm charging 900€ a day, 22 days a month in a country where the median salary is 3k€.
I pay around half in taxes and keep half for myself.
The company is disorganized, talents flee to other companies in a pretty competitive market so I'm not too worried about my job. I'm well spoken and I can explain my job to my managers.
Projects get spin up and shut down for legal reasons (ie: a deal is made with a retailer in Asia, then the deal is shut down because the retailer merges with a competitor), I just get reassigned, work a few months and then move on.
The company I work for is attached to a huge european retail company. The retail company pumps cash into the company I work for every year to keep it alive.
I log my daily activities as part of a personal project, I usually spend 2/3 hours doing deep work, in the morning, after our daily stand up meeting. In the afternoon I take walks with my wife, read, work on personal stuff, but stay available on Slack just in case someone pings me.
I havent worked more than 16 hours a week for the past 4 months according to my daily logs. I only had to work really hard for a couple of months about a year ago when a project had to be shipped and the senior dev in charge of it left without warning
It's a very unusual situation to be in with such a high salary but it's fairly easy to find a gig like this as a freelancer in a large group / a bank while raking in 620€ a day before taxes.
I wish you all the best, I probably won't do this all my life but I'm enjoying it while it lasts after spending the last 3 years working 11 hours a day on average, week-end included.