If you consider what your role is in creating wealth, then arguably you are doing something more important than most regular employees. How often can an engineer at Google say that their specific input caused the company to grow by 500%? Yet, even employees at modest startups with modest exits can say they had a significant hand in that level of growth.
If you are commenting on the "making the world a better place" trope, then that may be a different story.
I can create 100% growth by changing my customer base from 1 to 2.
Google can create 0.001% growth by adding another 100,000 customers (made up percentage, you get the idea).
Is 100% > 0.001%? Not by my math.
You know who is changing the world? Some engineer working on optimizing the cache lines on some Intel processor. Her work will, over the life of the chip, save millions to perhaps billions of hours, with similar effects on watts used, time wasted, and so on.
Can that Intel engineer give #s to quantify her impact on the world? Not likely. It doesn't mean that it isn't there, nor that a rational person cannot recognize it.
Working at a startup and making a considerable change is all fine and dandy, but when they exit and your only getting 0.01% even though you were the first group of devs, then its a bit crappy.
