No, but it will take you down a career path that exposes you to more luck & uncertainty than an SIE.
Features engineers can have lucrative, long-lived careers. It usually means they need to be the primary or lead engineer responsible for a significant user-visible product. Think of Andy Hertzfeld for the Macintosh, John Carmack for Doom/Quake, Anders Hejlsberg for Turbo Pascal and Delphi, or Aston Motes at Dropbox. Some of them cashed out directly with F-U money from a startup; others used past track records to get a startup of their own funded or a lucrative job at a big company.
The downside is that you're very exposed to the risk of your project failing and nobody caring about it. At the stage of a project where a SIE is most useful, the project is already underway, people know it's a good idea, and they just need to execute solidly. At the stage where a SFE is useful, the whole point of the project is unknown - that's why you need an engineer that specializes in rapidly testing things out. This applies in big companies as well - my role at Google could best be described as a SFE (though they don't have the title), and I had to prototype a number of features, a couple of which worked out and a good many of which did not.
There's very significant crossover between the SFE role and that of a technical cofounder - the main differences are risk tolerance, willingness to go out and interact with users personally, and product vision. It's very common for people who enjoy the prototyping aspect to end up starting their own companies, as that gives the best alignment of incentives and ability to capitalize on their own work. It's still possible to be a "professional early-employee" or even make a prototyping/R&D role work in a big company, but you need to demonstrate wins in your career.
Indeed, I have created my own company ;) It feels like a failure compared to the steady money that my SIE ex-coworkers have, but I enjoy it much more. Your insights give me good context to visualize my career, thank you.
Features engineers can have lucrative, long-lived careers. It usually means they need to be the primary or lead engineer responsible for a significant user-visible product. Think of Andy Hertzfeld for the Macintosh, John Carmack for Doom/Quake, Anders Hejlsberg for Turbo Pascal and Delphi, or Aston Motes at Dropbox. Some of them cashed out directly with F-U money from a startup; others used past track records to get a startup of their own funded or a lucrative job at a big company.
The downside is that you're very exposed to the risk of your project failing and nobody caring about it. At the stage of a project where a SIE is most useful, the project is already underway, people know it's a good idea, and they just need to execute solidly. At the stage where a SFE is useful, the whole point of the project is unknown - that's why you need an engineer that specializes in rapidly testing things out. This applies in big companies as well - my role at Google could best be described as a SFE (though they don't have the title), and I had to prototype a number of features, a couple of which worked out and a good many of which did not.
There's very significant crossover between the SFE role and that of a technical cofounder - the main differences are risk tolerance, willingness to go out and interact with users personally, and product vision. It's very common for people who enjoy the prototyping aspect to end up starting their own companies, as that gives the best alignment of incentives and ability to capitalize on their own work. It's still possible to be a "professional early-employee" or even make a prototyping/R&D role work in a big company, but you need to demonstrate wins in your career.