I was disappointed with the way companies I worked at organized their programmers so I started Software Engineering Daily, a podcast about software.

This economy rewards software skills and general acumen as much as programming.

I started coding at 14 and had my first paying contract at 16. Worked in a large startup once and freelanced until 22. Even though I was making 6 figures, I was extremely unhappy and depressed with the monotony and boredom my job had become.

I was fortunate (and probably lucky) to have been able to move to finance (hedge fund) at 23.

However being lazy on exercise, and social life makes me hate it for few hours in any given day of the week. Then I bounce back, get out ... get stuck in traffic.. and then working from home seems great again :)

Apple drops new frameworks and features every year, so there's always something new and interesting to learn. Not to mention Swift.

So yeah, I wouldn't really do anything else in this field.

Now at a small company where I just code all day long and nothing else? Extremely happy.

Where you work and who you work with matters.

I'm impartial to working as a programmer, though it pays the bills quite well.

I don't see myself working as a programmer my entire career. I have about 5years professionally, but how much longer, I don't know.

But it wasn't always that way -- my last job wasn't very challenging and it felt like I was just a cog in a giant machine (which, I was). It was pretty soul crushing despite being a "good" job. I felt bad about hating it so much, because compared to most people's jobs it was still much, much better in every aspect.

Another benefit is that at this level management is more concerned with the quality of my work than the volume, or whether I get in at 10:00 or take a two hour lunch break from time to time. I like to say "you're not paying me for the code I write, you're paying me for the code other people don't write because I'm here".

Programming, however, is definitely a field where you can learn the profession and get a job making good money without getting formal education. I notice a lot of recruiters are more interested in your passing a sample test or viewing your past projects than necessarily with your University diplomas and certificates.

In summary we are treated like professionals and work professionally.

It's not pure commercial work at uniprot.org but it must deliver. The site is popular enough and constraints are interesting. All in all happy.

The job pays decent and allows me to be flexible with time. Which is important to me as a dad.

- Scripts, tools, etc. Here I really enjoy being able to automize tasks. Then being able to combine scripts, tools, etc. into even more useful things makes me even more happy. Some things almost become magical once they have been automized.

- Games. Here I enjoy being able to create something fun out of nothing.

- Debugging. Finally finding a hard to find bug can give a quite unique rush of happiness.

- Research/innovation. Working on something brand new which no one has done before and finally releasing a product which people enjoy is sheer pleasure.

- Web development/user interfaces. Finally finding the right combination of simplicity and usefulness to create a really usable product is also a very pleasurable journey.

I think its pretty much what I am doing. But the big question that pops up after a certain period of time: How long are you going to love something? 5 years, 2 years, 1 year or 6 months? That truly varies from the project i am working on. As long as its all fun, i continue the job. If not, i move to my next job or a next project. There are so many IT, programming jobs (for more or less money). I think what matters is that you are loving what you doing. So far, for last 9 years of professionally working at 8 different companies that has been my norm and I don't think it's that bad or worrisome.

The rest is listening to bullshit from coworkers and reading hackernews, reddit etc.

Ive changed workplaces, this is my 3rd in 5 years, and its the same in my experience from those 3 very different "enterprises", "way of working", "agile" and other scrum bullshit methods, manager talk, backstabbing, backtalking and bad coffe.

At work I am quite miserable. Working with technologies I loved and grew up with, Linux, python, distributed systems, yet I look forward to just quitting one day. Maybe start working as a window-cleaner or similar.

Pros: - I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was younger - I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want - I can work from home whenever I want - My work is intellectually stimulating - My coworkers are smart and interesting - I get to play with dogs at work - If I don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: - I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or medicine - Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense - Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from each other or my current job - Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing with the latest technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually making things - The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF, whereas I want to live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer (from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds (not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it" and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

Programming always brings oppertunities from small stuff like side projects up to your own company. And we are in this one profession which has a bright future ahead in a society that is owned by programms. Right now we have the freedome of choice if you dont like your current job you can easily find a new one with the same or better pay.

We are the Artist, Stonemasons and Architects in conjunction.

(I earn around $100/hr, but my life organisation skills are so miserable that I can't yet make the ends meet. And I have to travel around 50 times per year).

Scala/Java.

My goal is to learn vagrant and spin up vms to handle variable load tasks. I want to be able to process website data using Hadoop and store the various outputs to my database. It's not novel but it's all new to me and I'm excited.

However, I temporarily gave that up to see how I'd like the corporate world of Java programming. Although I don't mind working around people (previously worked from home), I will say this: I care more about the software instead of someone's weekend.

The bad ones just want a grunt who asks no questions and turns out code without contradicting the project leads or architects, even when they're talking shit. No fun at all.

I have found that my growing skills outpace the level of challenge provided in my day job. I just think this is a fact of life when your work stems from your hobby.

As an analogy, I think of someone who works with metals (e.g my father). The type of work asked of him was routine stuff where as he was free to sculpt cool gifts for his family. The unfortunate fact is that it's easier to make a living doing routine stuff since those requirements are far more common.

Perhaps there is a company that would match skill growth with challenge growth but somehow I think I'm in a sort-of 'limbo' where I'm not skilled enough or hold the experience to work at those places so I must resign myself to the less interesting jobs.

Some days I'm just in awe of how lucky I am.

I work for a nonprofit so we are more mission focused than the average company and don't have to deal with certain kinds of bs to the same degree. My team is great, I've got a nice range of people to learn from.

Now, time to get out of bed and go to work...

I was a Journalist, the video and multimedia producer for a medium market newspaper. Pay was lower middle income level. Hours were flexible when flexibility was an option, but revolved around an inflexible daily deadline.

I just spent my 4th weekend in a row snowboarding, and yesterday was 11" of powder. As a remote employee, I still have deadlines, but they are from days to months depending on the project. Pay is upper-middle income level. My boss is great, smartest person I've ever called a boss, and extremely reasonable and personable.

Right now, life is good.

I truly love programming and solving problems, so it never feels like work. Well, that's not a completely true statement; not everything is going to be fun and awesome, but 99% of the time it doesn't feel like work.

When everything goes well, when I am working on code bases I like, on interesting features or on Open Source software, I am pretty happy.

When I am tracking an obscure bug that annoys my users for days, in an obscure proprietary code base and with a tight deadline approaching, I am somewhat less happy.

Sometimes, it is a stressful job, especially when you are close to production systems. But the rest of the time, it is so rewarding I would not for a second consider doing something else.

I’m at my peak happiness when I work on my own solo projects or on projects where everyone is “one team, one dream”. Although I’ve built up some thick skin over the users I’ve worked on too many projects with splintered goals amongst team members, even well-meaning ones, that I start to think that I’m too tired for that shit.

I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested. They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate bosses for not making the fix a priority.

tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that will kill you.

PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now" moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.

It`s my third year of doing my current job, IT project managing/IT system managing in Teleco company(Not in the U.S.) and I always dream about being a developer which I wanted to be before I got this job, because I like write a code I like learning something new. I don`t like my current job because it is very monotonous, it has very little things to learn as an Engineer(As far as I experienced). It`s just all about risk/cost/quality/deadline management + a lot of paper works. At the same time, however, I also afraid that If I quit my job and be a developer, I might lose everything that my job give me now - high salary, job security, not bad work/life balance(9 to 6~7). Because, in my country, most of developer cannot have those things like good salary as mine, w/l balance(close to 10 to 10 almost everyday) and job security. Yeap. Being a programmer in my country is quite tough choice.

Many of my friend having told that I have to stay in my job and write a code as hobby, and some people says I should do things that makes you happy. Someone says 'Working as a programmer is not as fun as programming for hobby', but the other says that if I 'stuck' in my current job, there will be no 'improving'.

It`s really really hard choice for me.

    6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their
    priorities are more important than your own.
    The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding
    getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and
    nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations just get higher and more grind.

That's why I started to do my own development on my own ideas at home. Ever since I started to do so I'm feeling much better. I regularly contribute to GitHub projects as well. I also feel rejuvenated by being LEAN and using the fewest possible 3rd party libraries. Now I know the code I'm using since I can see the source of all libraries I use and they are much simpler than the enterprise stuff. I'm sure that after a number of successful side projects I will be able to work on my stuff full time. This is my primary focus at the moment and the thought of achieving this makes me more happier now reaching a 7/10.

Also, programmers like to create things, and if you're just maintaining projects, you're probably less happy. So for me moving from employee to freelance (creating over maintaining) increased happiness.

Been working as a programmer since I was 18 (32 now): on and off (worked part time & took some time off for studies), but mostly on.

I like the project I'm working on. I only go to the office twice per week and work from home the rest of the time. I like my coworkers. My pay is pretty good (enough that I don't have to worry about supporting my wife & son).

On the downside sometimes xcode crashes or git behaves in weird ways that I don't understand.

I wanted an intellectual challenge and to serve my community, yet what I'm mostly doing is glueing libraries I don't even understand together and squeezing out performance and page impressions to make someone I don't care about richer.

I wanted to consider myself an artist, not an interchangeable cog in a materialistic machinery. A craftsman that truly cares about his work and learns from others, not blindly following imposed cargo cult and so called best practices with the ultimate goal of optimising for the lowest common denominator and promoting cheap labor.

I wanted to learn and discover new things that are truly useful, but what I see is an extreme focus on tooling. The latest new cool framework on the block while showing complete disregard for already existing knowledge and tools.

They said technology was to make our lives better, yet it has become a means to an end in itself. I wish for a more perennial school of thought in software, a back to the basis, and I'm not even 30.

But I have to pay my bills somehow.

Then again, we have it much better than other labor in the workforce.

The thing I don't like is everything that got added on when I turned my hobby into my profession. But it's all that stuff which is the reason why my family live the way we do.

I'd be happy doing something I truly believed in, but at least I'm not working in a mechanics garage in mid winter for national minimum wage.

This has been the best career change that I could have ever had.

I've also worked construction for five years. I don't think I'll ever want another job. Probably because I've already been on the other side and I know what life is like there.

to answer the op's question 10/10 I'm very gratefull.

It's very easy to get jaded. It's very easy to stare at the bespoke insurance application you and 6 other people have built (or slotted together from hideous technologies your client has already purchased) and wonder what the point of it all is.

Writing code for something you're passionate about helps.

Working out how to do things--not even important things, but just _other_ things--outside of work helps.

Remembering that the effort / money ratio in programming (esp if you live in fancy parts of the states, which I do not, or want to sell your soul to the London bankers, which I also do not) is really pretty fantastic helps as well.

A couple of years ago I moved into an architect postition and while the high level of abstraction, customer interface and leading and instructing the development team is enjoyable I feel my personal development has slowed down significantly because I have very little time to contribute to the actual code. On my spare time I'd rather concentrate on my other hobbies and when I do programming it's mostly dabbling in Ruby, Clojure and other stuff I'd hardly be using at work. Currently I'm looking for a new gig that would be a lot more hands-on.

By cushy I mean they have flexi time and let me work 100% from home even though the office is less than 10 miles away. The boss is not pushy about deadlines and the work is not challenging.

By badly paid I mean I make about half of what I should be at my level of skill and experience.

I live in a small town. I could move to a big city and get more money, but I think my happiness level would drop. I really like it here. Life is good.

Of course, at least once a week I start getting paranoid and thinking that the company will eventually go under (we've had a few rough patches) and I'll have to move. And then I'll have spent 10+ years being underpaid with nothing to show for it, and it won't look good to a potential new employer. I worry that I'll be too old to be employable. That I should move now for my families sake. But then, I wonder how many successful well paid programmers look back over a career and think "well, I'm glad I spent less time with my family, because now I have all that extra money"

As for the work, as I said, it's not challenging. I've been tinkering with computers since I was a child, and its been a natural career path for me. I really don't think I could have been anything else, it was always going to be code. There are moments when I think I'm wasting my life standing in front of a monitor for 8 hours a day, but there are worse jobs, and I have to put food on the table. And that's really a complaint about society in general, not an issue with my particular choices.

I code outside of work hours, making apps and web-services mostly for my own use. I've never been very good at making money off any of them, but that's not really the point. I do it because it's who I am. My worst nightmare (sad but true) is coming down with some kind of a medical condition that would prevent me from typing or looking at screens. It would kill me.

I really enjoy my career as a Software Engineer though. It's been, mostly, fun, and as I've learned and grown I've got the chance to work on more and more interesting things.

Currently I'm helping to build a cloud provider for a specialized sector of the economy that has eschewed the cloud (until now).

12 years experience in web development.

I really love the job, I've done coding and software development as a hobby since I was 14, maybe 15 years old, because it was always my dream to do this kind of thing.

After I've finished my apprenticeship as a java ee / android dev 2 1/2 years ago, I continued to work for the same company who hired me as an apprentice in the first place. After that, I decided that I need a "change of scenery" and to explore the big world of professional software development.

The second company, which I currently work for since a year now, is however somewhat very different. I've started my career with an already existing business project (imagine your typical java enterprise project here -> rdbms + application server + java rich client), supporting it, making the clients happy with _everything_ they want.

It was in a really bad condition (architecture, software design, ui design of the main application, the client was fed up with), but it was doable, so I decided to make a change. I started developing a new client, with modern design and a cross plattform approach, and everyone loved it, I got great response from everyone and the project even got a stockup of developers from 2 to 6 - just because of my work and the resulting interest of the client (= more money++ for my company for a project which was theoretically thought dead). Everything was great.

The last 3-4 month however were terrible. I learned enough about this project to understand of what hell im into now: the client hasn't the slightest idea of what this project is doing anyways. The team leader had no experience in leading teams or even projects, because he was actually an architect which has done a solo job on this project for 4-5-6 years now.

After all, the project was developed because the client's company had money. But this is a different story, however...

The feature requests of the client were getting more and more, the time to accomplish goals was getting less and less. There wasn't even time anymore to test things, (I know, testing - haha, but this company is pretty well known in the world of testing and test-consulting, every other project there is heavily tested for example), or to get rid of technical dept. - every accomplished jira task was just a patch of code and hopes, pushed into the project git, hoping that everything will work - but of course, if you changed something, everything fell down like theres no tomorrow.

I just couldn't work like this anymore, I've tried it several times to talk with my boss or my project lead to get rid of, or at least, minimize the impact of technical dept on this project, because it was the main problem which consumed most of the time AND budget, when solving features for the client. After the "critical path" of this project, and 2 happy clients, we had a sit in with the whole team, including the team leader, and my boss.

We talked about everything, what went good, what went wrong, how to improve ourselfs and how to manage clients in order to prevent something like this the next time and I was really, really happy with it.

As the time went by, the project lead was taking a break because of way to many additional workhours, I was fine with it. It was just one month to go until new year, and after that, I thought, everything will be fine - of course it wasn't.

The workload doubled in this month, no team lead, just me and my coworkers who had just half of an idea of this _great_great_ project. Anyways, we've made it. Everything the client wished for was done and even more, they were happy.

As my vacation began and the new year started, I fell into a deep depressive hole. Me and my project lead were so terrible burned out, that after 3 weeks of vacation, I needed another 3 weeks just to get into real life again. Today is my last free day of this 6 week timeout and I hope that I've got enough power and endurance to get back on track.

I've learned a lot about company politics in the last year, how to handle clients, new coworkers, bosses and a lot of do's and dont's on enterprise java development. But I've also learned alot about the "darkside" of software development.

I love the craftmenship and all the clever thoughts and every single person I've worked with - but if you start a career in that industry or a new job be aware, that money is the only thing that counts at the end of the day. So be grateful if you're getting paid to play with the newest technology or just try stuff out.

P.S. - Sorry for the long personal post and the horrible spelling, english is not my native language. I feel better.

Lately however, I've heard a lot of "I hate programming..." kind of talk from my classmates and by talking to them, I came to realise that most of them are in just for the promise of a good pay, that they do basically no programming or side projects outside of labs and that they had an illusion that the basics of C++ the university taught them is the whole deal and are only now discovering memory management, templates and such, which makes them frustrated. Also, very few of them have tried anything outside of C++, mostly because they didn't know anything else existed and didn't bother looking.

This frustrates me a great deal, since I quite frankly think that if pay is your only concern, you're better off in law, medicine, the finance/banking industry, or hell - oil & gas management for that matter.

This is the reason that the tech industry over here, (UK/not London) is so old-fashioned and extremely boring, new players not able to spring up; because these recent graduate students everyone's hiring can't do anything more complex than what a repetitive Java shop can offer.

Everyone is really nice here, but it's the management. The boss acts like we're in the 50's. Everyone must wear a shirt and tie, no headphones are allowed because it's 'unprofessional', any talk of unions or the like is 'communism' and no plants allowed in the office because he doesn't like plants.

Add to that we're woefully underpaid as developers. We tend to lose a lot of developers after three or four years due to the pay and the slowness the company has in switching to new technology and delivery models (web and mobile apps are on our roadmap, we haven't even started implementing them and won't for at least two or three more years) and they are generally replaced by graduates, meaning the code base suffers as a result.

But right now it's a 9/10.

Formerly we were four separate web developers. Only consulting with each other, and not really ever working together on projects. And two of the four of us constantly had 6 or more projects we were juggling concurrently (I know, right?) It was really rough, even with being able to work remote four days a week and having a fair amount of autonomy, it was wearing thin.

Then we ran an experiment, two of us doing pair programming on a single project. We loved it. Then the company sent some of us out for proper Scrum Master training, and committed to doing SCRUM properly.

Since the switch we have become a cohesive team. We rotate partners every sprint and we only work on one project at a time. I actually enjoy work now. The whole team feels the same way.

Pros: - I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was younger

- I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want

- I can work from home whenever I want

- My work is intellectually stimulating

- My coworkers are smart and interesting

- I get to play with dogs at work

- If I don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: - I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or medicine

- Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense

- Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from each other or my current job

- Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing with the latest technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually making things

- The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF, whereas I want to live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer (from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds (not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it" and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

Occasionally something interesting crops up but I generally want to find an in-house role working on a web app or something.

I don't have to be happy because I am putting my partner through university so they can pursue an academic career and putting food on the table.

The work is boring in general but i am trying to make it more interesting in getting more involved in production investigations (can be exciting quite often) and helping other people at work find some crazy bug or better understand something...

Working, not necessarily that happy.

Programming is a manifestation of curiosity. Therefore, programming is a spark that, once ignited, probably never really dies. You can suffocate it and pretend it's out but when things free up again it will come back. If I wouldn't be working I would simply be programming on my spare time more than I do now. I can only speak for 30 years down the line, though, so YMMV.

Working is a whole another thing. It's a great opportunity to work on interesting and challenging things. It's also an opportunity to see those interesting and challenging things serve goals you don't find so interesting and challenging. That's obviously because the owner of the company gets to decide what the company makes. The problem is decent income and good benefits. There's really no other way to fix that problem except to stop working and get your income from a company of your or your investment returns.

Much of what I do at work is not programming even if I am a programmer. Most of it is communication, maybe comes down to fixing bugs so that other people can continue their work, and then there's a slice of actual development in between, at times. It's not necessarily development that would always be fun but it's still interesting and challenging. I could imagine doing something else but the nature of work wouldn't change except that the payoff would likely be lower. I could work on something else but not as an employee.

Is it what I'd do with my time if I didn't have to make a living? Maybe a few hours a week.

Is it more enjoyable than most of the alternative ways I could imagine making a living? Hell yeah!

Does it have its exhausting, hellish days and political bullshit? Doesn't everything?

Could I stand to do it in a bureaucratic corporate setting, doing nothing but maintaining a small corner of some horrible enterprise monstrosity and filing TPS reports? Probably not.

How happy am I doing it in the small company / startup setting I've been in for the last 15 years, with plenty of autonomy and a decent proportion of green-field work? About as happy as I'm going to be working any "day job".

Over the past 3 years working in this industry I've learned more things about more topics than I have in the past 10 and I don't see this changing any time soon.

I've worked for several different companies over the years; a Java shop that builds large web-shops and corporate websites, a local startup focusing on science, a local radio station maintaining their site. All of them bored me after 6 to 12 months of learning their tooling and technologies. Many tech companies tend to stagnate on their stack and are afraid or too invested in it to change which is a huge contrast to where I'm working now.

Sure, the work I do isn't saving the world or disrupting a stagnant industry like many startups claim to do, but it's certainly challenging and keeps me happy as a programmer.

Edit: I should add that working remotely has been absolutely fantastic and adds to why I enjoy being a programmer. I feel lucky to work in a profession that allows this amount of flexibility.

I have also met some wonderful friends and intellectual peers through my programming jobs, and I'm even trying to write my own language now for laughs. I'm trying to encourage everyone with the aptitude to get into it because it is rewarding in many different ways.

Alas, reality is only what it is. I suppose writing code in an office beats manual labor or a life of crime.

- I have ability to automate something. I can tell the PC import data automatically instead of doing by manual, or make apps let me store some sensitive data that I don't trust anyone else (and their apps, of course).

- I have opportunity to be a digital nomad, work everywhere over the world. Yeah that's just my vision, but now I can work everywhere in my country. Travel and work, perfect couple, especially when I'm single now. I'm trying to do all things that a husband cannot do, before I find my spouse out :D.

- I have skills to turn my ideas to real products which may help someone. Now I'm an iOS Engineer, and yes, making several apps, not big ones but helpful for somebody. But at the first, I always try to resolve my problems, then believe that someone may in trouble like me, they may find my apps useful.

- Because of making apps, I found a romantic approach that I can give my friends as I made an app exclusively for a girl, a drawing tool let us remind our moments in the past.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm happy, but working at a startup is hard and that can sometimes be depressing.

Prior to my current gig it was

8/10 - Interesting problems; well fitted-out office with great people to work with and coffee nearby; the opportunity to grow technical and people skills and mentor.

In the 90s I worked in public service doing accounting and marketing gigs. I'd rate those jobs about 3-4/10. So I'm pretty happy with the transition.

On the other hand, I have a decade of full-time experience and I've been happy for about seven out of ten years. All things considered, that's not too bad. The other way to look at it is that I've had maybe five roles at one company, two another another, and one at a third, and I'd say four of those have been good. That's only 4/8, but it's possible to bail on bad roles and stay in good ones, which is how it's worked out to being good 70% of the time. Considering how other folks I know feel about their job, I can't complain about being happy 70% of the time.

In retrospect, some of my decisions have been really bad. If I could do it over again, I'd bail more quickly on bad roles and stay in good ones for longer.

My dumbest mistake was the time I was in an amazing position (great manager & team, really interesting & impactful work), except for two problems: an incredibly arrogant and disruptive person whose net productivity was close to zero who would derail all meetings and weird political shenanigans way above my pay grade. When I transferred, management offered to transfer the guy the guy to another team so I'd stay and I declined because I felt bad about the idea of kicking someone off the team.

From what I've heard, the problematic dude ended up leaving the team later anyway, so not having him kicked off didn't make any difference, and the political stuff resolved itself around the same time. The next role I ended up in was the worst job I've ever had. And the one after that is my current job, which is, well, at least it's no the worst job I've ever had. Prior to leaving the amazing job, I thought that it was really easy to find great jobs, so it wasn't a big deal to just go find another one. Turns out it's not always so easy :-). If I hadn't bailed on that and just fixed it, I'd be 4/6 and I could say I was happy with my job 80% of the time. Oh well, lesson learned. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to get the roles that I did, but that same luck blinded me to the fact that it was luck and that there are some really bad jobs out there.

So ... it's going to be contribute to OSS (because the creative part of still worth something), become a truck driver, and write plays in my spare time... Art is the only thing that means anything in the long run - the fruits of business mean nothing, especially in IT given how the "churn" is less than a decade.

The pay isn't amazing either. Though I'm good at what I do (a lot better than some colleagues who are getting paid much better), I just can't get excited for yet another startup job (which is where I've been most of my career) which is working on a non-problem.

The work needs to be interesting for me to be motivated. So far, it's mundane. And given I'm not in the US or any western country, I haven't found many companies working on interesting stuff here. It's all ideas copied from the valley and hammered into the ecosystem here.

Perhaps I need some inspiration or some creative idea to put things into perspective. But yeah. Things could be a lot better. I've recently started getting into Statistics/ML and learning Clojure on the side as a distraction and that's been going well.

Is there an implication that work should be fun and fulfilling so as to make me happy? Work does not make me happy. It affords me the money I need to keep my family healthy and safe. Happiness comes from within: art, literature, mathematics, science, family, friends... life.

I just make money by selling some portion of my waking life to the pursuits of others by helping them realize their ideas in software.

The ideas I have are just not marketable. My curiosity hasn't led me to dream about ways I can extract rents from financial tools or make advertising more profitable. I find myself to have more in common with Donald Knuth or John Conway than Larry Ellison or Bill Gates. If I could find a way to work with hard, fundamental problems or pursue hunches that may have no fiscal utility I'd be happy as a clam at high water. Alas I never had the privilege and opportunity to pursue a career in academia and, given what I understand of the current climates there, probably wouldn't find it fulfilling either.

So I content myself with tinkering and following my own hunches and try to maximize the dollars-per-hour exchange I make so I can spend less time with the mundane world of markets and value and return to the land of whimsy.

Update To clarify, I don't want to put myself in the same esteem as my heroes, Knuth or Conway. What I do find in common with them is a curiosity and propensity for selecting problems merely because they are interesting and with disregard for external factors such as economic utility.

I enjoyed programming as a kid but after learning more about how much programmers were often exploited (especially in the games industry) and having a few bad experiences doing small contract jobs I figured it wasn't for me.

Luckily I somehow stumbled into it again half-way through university and started doing full-time contracting.

With some of my clients, work was a nightmare. They'd demand the impossible and wouldn't be satisfied no matter how much effort and thought I poured into it. The work was unrewarding and I constantly felt like a fraud.

With others it was complete bliss. I got to work with clever people who are good at what they're doing and learned a lot from them. My input was appreciated and I was given a lot of control over my work. The teams were great and the people I enjoyed spending my lunch breaks with.

Over time I earned enough money to be able to search for more of the latter kind of work while turning down more of the former. These days I can pretty much pick and choose and make sure to keep an option to walk away if I'm not certain about a job I'm taking.

I have never been happier. But if you had asked me when I was in long-term contracts with the worst clients, I would have told you a very different story.

It's inside work with no heavy lifting, I get paid way above the median wage, and I get to intermittently learn new things, and build new stuff.

I'm not a constantly ecstatic ball of happiness, but that sounds more like a drug-induced dream than something that real people get to be. Instead I'm "mostly satisfied, with occasional peaks, and some bits that annoy me." - and that's a lot better than the non-programming jobs I've had.

Writing code for work can be a mixed bag, though, since you don't necessarily always get to work on things you like or in a manner conducive to productivity. But even in "not-fun" projects, the reason why I often perform better than other programmers is because I love it. As a rule I have learned that people who are going it nine-to-five with zero actual interest in the skill set aren't as happy or as good.

So how happy you are working as a programmer depends on many, many factors. Is programming a creative outlet for you? Are you working on something you care about? Are you getting paid and appreciated? Are you susceptible to burnout? All things being equal, if you already are a programmer, chances are you'll eventually be happy working as a programmer.

I so often spiral into an endless loop of "this could be done better, rewrite from scratch, must have more decoupling!!".

Right now I really like the product and management side of the work, but the technical / programmer side I am very burned out on. I used to spend my free time consulting, coding, researching, and had dreams of starting my own company. Now I want to go home and relax, work with my hands out in the yard/garden.

I've been at the same company for 7 years now, we typically have enough freedom and project variation to learn new skills and keep from being bored. There are simply to many frameworks/languages to keep up with to stay relevant. I don't see myself finding another development job after this one, at least not without time off/a break. The money is great, and I've been fortunate to save well, and we live will below our means.

Honestly, I'm working on a plan to be out of the industry by the time my daughter graduates high school and I'm 45.

At present, I have no idea what the future has in store for me, but whatever it is I hope it grants me some level of satisfaction at least.

On one hand, it's a cushy job. I work from home almost whenever need to. I can find remote work if that's not enough. I'm paid well. I get a decent vacation time. It's easier than physical labor.

And I love to program. I enjoy solving problems and writing code to implement it. I even enjoy debugging and tracking down bugs.

But at the same time, I haven't found working as a programmer to be very enjoyable. It's rare that my interests and my work tasks intersect, so most of the time I'm toiling away on projects I'm not really interested in, wishing I was working on whatever small project I've come up with at home.

Also, as I've grown older I've become increasingly annoyed by the "culture" around programming and computers.

TBH, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off doing something else and just programming at home in my spare time.

I have few friends or hobbies. Most of my coworkers can't even hold a conversation, much less go clubbing or play sports with me.

I've had chronic burning pain in both legs since age 14. The doctors say too much computer usage led to poor core strength which damaged my spine.

I think computer use damaged my body as well as my social skills.

The speed at which startups move is a cause for concern, however, because many of the people with which I worked were simply "lean in" types, and would have been able to get a job doing just about anything. The problem was that many of these ninja rockstar 10x efficiency evangelists didn't really work with Git well and didn't really value the command line. Linux knowledge was very minimal.

I worked for four startups, and found that only one of them had ONE employee who had a solid computer science background.

Meanwhile board games last, there's value in old editions (I picked up a 40 year old copy of Diplomacy recently), and people still play games that are decades old (not all games, but enough to be worthwhile).

Also, even if I never get a single board game published (unlikely), I will still leave prototypes behind for my family to encounter. Meanwhile, my video games are on my hard drive and could disappear if they don't keep perpetuating digital copies of them.

Also you can make a video game version of the board game you made and now you can sell in two different mediums.

The pop culture obsession with the valley tech industry, and the resulting insane expectations folks hold when entering the industry, is a disservice to us all.

I love the work I do. It's not life changing. It's not going to make me rich in money or in spirit. It's a cushy lifestyle job that gives me the time and monetary freedom to do the other things I'm passionate about.

But that doesn't align with the fantasy of the valley, or frankly, the American protestant work ethic.

Have you worked with many "modern-day" 22 year-olds lately? Unless the company is intentionally looking for naivete as a trait, there are plenty of reasons to hire someone with more experience and maturity.

+1000, business analysts? I haven't seen a business analyst in 10 years.

Ah, the old "I'm not ok, you're not ok" section of the OK Corral[1].

[1] http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ok_not-ok.ht...

I considered restoring old vehicles, but didn't want to end up "just" a mechanic. It was working on cars that was my trigger to get out - I felt so much more satisfaction from restoring a car than I ever did from meeting a ship date. I think because it has a tangible sense of progress and completion, and there's something to point at that's more "real"

Comparing us to retail workers has some merit. We're not professions, have no collective representation, and can be easily replaced (despite current myths about how difficult it is to hire programmers there are hoards of new graduates and self-taught individuals making the leap from other careers and professions because of the money and cushy benefits -- most hiring processes seem to be designed to keep the majority of people out).

Hell, most of us could jump fields without losing steam. Systems administration, security, database administration, all of these can be done by a decent developer.

And that, I think, is a failure in our culture. American Protestant ethics teach us that your job should be a deep, elemental, almost spiritual part of who you are as a person. The result is that, when people graduate, and get that job, they discover that working is, quite often, a pretty shallow experience that, if you let it define you, will lead to a pretty unsatisfying existence.

So now you have a choice: get dissatisfied and start changing careers, hoping you can find something to give you a sense of meaning and purpose (which, if you're like a lot of people I know, very probably means you never excel at any one thing and therefore never get to the point of having a sustainable career that can fuel a fulfilling lifestyle). Or, start spreading those wings and becoming a well rounded person so that you're defined by more than your career.

I advise the latter.

Speaking for myself, I have a great lifestyle job. I love the people I work with, and the projects are reasonably interesting but not life changing, and occasionally repetitive. The work environment is comfortable and laid back, and I get to leave work at the office. The job absolutely will not make me rich, but it allows me to engage in not exactly cheap extracurricular activities (traveling, skiing, etc), while leaving me with free time to pursue numerous hobbies beyond programming.

To me, this constitutes success.

I've been consulting with various clients for the last 4 years. I make a few multiples more than I need to survive, and do not work more than 50% of the working days per year.

This is relatively easy to achieve:

- I have no debt outside of a couple school loans, which I prioritize paying down to zero. Everything else is either living expenses, or discretionary spending.

- I ensure my clients pay for everything they need—hosting, Github, any and all services. This is an easy sell, as it keeps everything firmly in their control and they can replace me at any time.

- I charge by the day, not the hour. My clients have never complained, and they seem to find it easier to think and budget in per-day terms.

I am genuinely curious to know as to how this equation can be practically implemented. To be really effective in your non-work time, x would have to be at most 5 or less. There are multiple problems with this: 1. Reducing expenses to half is pretty tough given the biggest expense is rent/mortgage. 2. Reducing work to half is harder since there are not very many companies that are okay with 20 hrs or less a week. This also means you wont get health insurance.

I guess it can be done by moving to a different country with cheaper expenses, job hunting for a while till you find a company that meets your needs, etc, etc. But as a single person or a family in the US, this just doesnt make sense.

I meant psychological problems rather than emotional, but I feel like those two are intertwined, anyway. Sorry for the confusion.

Being burnt-out is also a type of stress. What I meant to say is that, if you're constantly under stress it can have an impact on your emotional/psychological state as well, and you shouldn't underestimate the damage psychological stress can do to your personality.

Yes, they would no doubt prefer their high-paying job over a minimum wage job. But that doesn't mean that they no longer have any right to be unhappy with their lives. This is exactly the point of the hedonic treadmill[1]. There are happy people with rough jobs and unhappy people with great jobs.

[1]The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

Those people that you all mentioned are the working class. They are the people who are obligated to trade their time in labor for wages which are used (usually 100%) to pay for their own needs such as food, housing, and savings for retirement, which will also be spend of food and housing, just later in life.

When applying without a CS background how tough are the technical interviews? Do they tend to expect more or are they more lenient and look more at fit and ability to grow?

I am a particularly privileged individual because I have a choice of what labor I can do, and even how much to an extent. Most people don't have the choice of just switching careers because they feel like it, and even fewer have the option of even realizing that there is some sort of activity that would be more fulfilling than what they do to survive.

I believe the reality check needs to occur in the people who are too used to their own comfort that they can't even lift their blinders to look outside their own social environments and see the injustice that is happening on a massive scale in the world.

This retired gentleman, for instance, who volunteers his time installing Linux on computers that are being sent to children in Africa: http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/827...

That's a great start! He was not even a software engineer!

There are many people working in these industries who didn't have much opportunity to get decent education, etc. For example, my parents. They are from rural areas from Soviet Union, where getting higher education was not something that goes by default as it is now (which might not be a great thing given the number of people with worthless law/business management degrees from the bottom 10% of universities... oh well).

Obviously, there's a segment of people who didn't give a crap and held an attitude that education is for losers / nerds (before the word 'nerd' was cool) and I don't have much for them sympathy.

So it's not fair to just disrespect everyone working in the retail as 'zero brains'.

Hardest management job I ever had - working night shift manager at a food store while going to college during the day. Like surviving a hurricane while running a marathon while the building's on fire, every single night. I lived roughly a decade of "real" management in my senior year.

Cashiering required a surprising amount of memorization of obscure procedures and policies and item codes, not to mention carefully tracked flawless arithmetic skills when giving change.

The general manager was an artist of endcap design. At non-megacorp retail you're on your own when designing displays. Its truly an art. At the megacorps you have teams of CAD drafters, graphics artists, and sales consultants designing displays, at a non-megacorp story you have yourself, and the boss expects you to do as good of a job as the team. Teams are usually much less productive than individuals, so its not as hard as it sounds.

Stock clerk at higher levels was insane. Its really a two level job and the new hire teen kids merely threw product on marked shelves, but if you were there more than a year and were not an idiot you watched the more experienced guys and took over for them, after which you spent all your time on rotations and resets and price changes and sales stickering and being a reception clerk for the 50 or so direct store delivery trucks we had. I don't care if you have 20 pounds of soup cans for a 10 pound shelf, make all of them fit somehow and you need to accept deliveries from dairy and bread and beer and you have two hours until break time to get this all done plus or minus helping out everyone else.

I've noticed over many decades that despite enormous quantities of (self serving) propaganda, the hourly pay rate people get generally has little relationship with how difficult or important the job is, on a large enough scale.

Another interesting observation is the dumb people didn't survive on the job nearly as long as the smart people, and the dumb people absolutely suffered horribly compared to the smart people.

I came in, sat down, and thought "what do I want this machine to do that would be cool?"

And so I wrote a game. Other kids loved the game enough to fight over who could play it. That was pretty cool.

But I look at programming now? Damn, those days are gone. You don't sit down and in a day or so create something totally from scratch that people love. Instead you get a framework, or another, or half-a-dozen frameworks bolted onto a 3-year-old programming language. You head a bit down the happy path -- until you don't. Then you spend the rest of the development effort either a) giving up on what you wanted to code and instead coding what the framework makes you, or b) struggling with the framework instead of the problem.

Worst part? I don't think it's needed. You can do a ton with just plain html, some css, and a bit of simple functional-like programming. But if you try to show that to a new programmer? It's like telling them they need to carve their computer out of bear skins and tree stumps. The culture itself rejects just freaking doing stuff people want. Instead, if it ain't new, it ain't cool. And if it's got one piece of complexity? Might as well have a thousand.

I hear you guys. Sad that it's turned out this way.

How much effort is needed to get a cashier position? Show up, be sober - you got a job. Many people in IT started learning the ropes in their own time after school. Although it was a hobby, it was still an effort that turned out to be helpful in job market.

On what planet is a gym membership required to maintain a healthy lifestyle? How's this for an option: instead of owning/maintaining a car and paying for car insurance, ride a bike to work. Now you've killed two birds with one stone.

> internet connection

How about instead of paying for an internet connection you go to a library or hang out at a coffeeshop when you need to use it. Or go in with a neighbor to get it cheaper.

> any current debt (student loans, car loans, mortgage, personal loans, etc)

Sell the car, sell the house, and as far as the student loans go, consolidate them and pay the minimum for as long as you need to.

> So yeah, just cut all those expenses by 10x, have a job that allows you to work less than 20 hours/ week from anywhere, and have a altruistic goal that can also be met remotely without interacting with anyone ever.

Most people's expenses can be cut by about that much if they just give up the luxury of owning and operating a car and move to a region/neighborhood that has much cheaper rent (or take roommates gasp!). I have to image if your very survival depended on a 10x decrease in your expenses you'd be clever enough to make it happen.

> Oh and also, be a programmer - remember that an altruistic life is reserved for very specific niches of society, altruism should never be the goal of the huddled masses.

I don't remember me or anyone else ever saying that in this thread.

Working with your brain is a breeze. Yes, you get mentally exhausted. Eat some damn sugar, problem solved. You know what you don't get, that manual workers do ? Crippling disabilities, having no energy left once you get home, a terrible salary, dangerous work conditions.

We have it easy. Stop lying to yourself.

Well, funny you should say that. Years ago when I first moved to New Zealand (as a backpacker) my mindset was to find a job immediately, then look for a better one. My first "job" was as a labourer. Carrying large marble table tops up narrow windy stairs. Hardest job I ever did! Quit after one day, and my back is probably still thankful for it.

Does working with your brain leave you susceptible to long-term injury or disability?

I thought so too. However, the funny thing with market economy is that it IS pretty efficient, so jobs that are regarded as satisfying and challenging are approached by so many talented people that they don't have to pay very well and the conditions are usually not great.

The solution is to either accept that the role of a career is to get to you to early retirement ASAP (Mr Money Mustache style) or to get excited about something that most people don't care about.

And yet you are depending on your employer to provide you with this?

>but I am already looking at applying to medical school in a year if can't find a challenging and decently rewarding job in bioinfo

I see you running into the same issue.

Just because you've received "an education" doesn't entitle you to a glamorous, exciting job. You'll probably have to make that yourself.

No one will ever just give you an interesting career tailor-made for you. Find out what is interesting, fulfilling, and challenging, and make that your career over time. You start in your company doing menial crap but then move to interesting crap over time, by being intentional about what the company needs, what you need, and how you can leverage one to get the other.

Do it. I'm a programmer in my first year of med school. Love every single day. Beats sitting in a chair from 9-5 pounding in to a computer. FWIW I still do a ton of programming on my own.

Also, the field needs more doctor-programmers. You'll find boundless areas to apply your CS skills. Plus, if you don't try, I think you'll always wonder: what if?

Having even a modicum of job and financial security removes so much stress from your life.

As a retail worker, the pay is at or just above minimum wage and benefits like PTO and health insurance do not exist because the jobs are usually part time. Additionally, retail work always comes with irate customers who will piss you off, your coworkers off and your bosses off. So everyone is angry. Retail workers often do not have a set schedule, this is especially true during the holiday season. They have to find coverage before taking an unpaid day of leave. Lastly, because no real skill is needed to work in retail, workers are easily replaceable. 1 mistake can get you canned.

How is a situation like that more stressful than being on call of which you get paid to be on?

TLDR; its the passion for creation which drives any job.As a programmer having things setup in hours or weeks and then seeing your product being used by a percentage of the 3 billion people[3] who use the www.It brings a hell load of satisfaction in me.

[1]:http://hello-world.io [2]:http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary [3]:http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

I worked at Lowes in college hauling lumber and I miss it dearly (rose colored goggles and all). I was in the best shape of my life, I didn't think about work (lumber?) at home. It was a simpler life.

I worked at a car wash (vacuuming, drying cars, etc.) for 9 months when I was 15, and I loved every minute of it, despite the fact that it was very laborious. I had many jobs in the year before that, most of which were inside without much labor, and I hated each of them.

Then, I framed houses (first 3 months were basically just carrying things around and making cuts for others) for a year when I was 16, and it was a blast, as long as it was warm outside. However, what was not a blast was making $7.25/hr. I felt great though, super healthy from all the lifting, walking, climbing, etc. The only non-monetary negative was cold weather; swinging a hammer in the cold is no bueno for anyone.

I also did landscaping at 17... for one day. I'm not going to lie. Landscaping is mega hard work, and the 3 Mexican men I worked with put me to shame in less than 6 hours, despite my frequent visits to the gym and +10 years of youth I had on them.

Now, I write code. I love it, but I absolutely hate being in a chair, and standing while I type is not appealing to me. I work out for 45 min every day at the gym after, but it doesn't make up for all the cave-dwelling I do.

In summary, I think that labor is usually really rewarding, even when you feel pooped at the end of the day, but certain labor jobs push the envelope a bit too far to be called "rewarding".

Do you know people who do that kind of work? I spent three years working with a decent sampling of them. Sure, some feel that it's drudge work and that they're stuck doing it for lack of options. They get through their day doing the minimum necessary - you can find those types in our field as well. But a lot do take real pride in what they do, and in doing it well.

Of course many if not most would take an office job for more money if they opportunity were there - but that doesn't mean none of them derive pleasure and satisfaction form the work they're doing.

of course physical labor does not pay as much, as long as the pool of workers is significantly larger. Doesn't mean that some folks would choose another career path if other fields would pay as much as software engineering does.

I'm not sure if I'm describing a cooperative, I just know that most normal companies do the exact opposite of this: they force you to live in a high cost area where you spend a large proportion of your salary on housing and other living costs.

I know there are plenty of good reasons why humans have decided to live in cities, but I can't help thinking there's a better way.

If someone takes a risk to build something valuable, he/she deserves to get rich.

Even the worst days of the last 9 years have never been as hard as the best days before it.

I said its completely unreasonable.

Do you honestly think thats reasonable? For someone to be altruistic they /should/ have to make all those decisions and sacrifices?

If you do, i'd love to hear why you think it should be impossible for a secretary, or a janitor, or an accountant to be altruistic and to work towards altruistic goals. Or for that matter someone living in New york or san francisco. Should those cities be devoid of altruism because they are more expensive?

I don't think you've earnestly considered the implications of your suggestion and that was the point of my responding at all. "helping animals is easy! just quit your job and move across the country" echos exactly the ops sentiments that it takess a herculean effort to effect any change in todays economy. You disputed that by laying out a specific herculean effort and tried to brush it off as a simple life decision.

Some companies observe different holidays, such as by adding Christmas Eve and the day after Thanksgiving, and removing Columbus Day.

There is no such thing as public holidays in the US. Some days are bank holidays. Some days are school holidays. Some days are federal holidays. But there is no law that requires any employer to give all of its nonessential employees paid time off on any particular day. The only sort-of-exception is that an employer can't prevent someone from voting on Election Day, but that does not have to be paid leave.

Wal-Mart, for instance, has only 5 paid holidays: Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas. (Note that Easter is always on a Sunday, a time when many people already have a day off from work.) And if you get holiday bonus pay for working on those days, your hours are rumored to be cut afterward to compensate.

Some companies are also generous enough to allow 80 additional hours of paid time off every year, to be used as either sick leave or vacation days.

I will say, I support opening opportunities to learn. Not everyone has a computer - help foster an environment that gets people access to one.

You cannot force someone to have the willpower to work on this, the _best_ you can do is offer opportunities.

All I can say is that you are incredibly lucky if this is a true statement.

How can it more risky for first four employees?

In reality, whistleblowers always get screwed. You would have to extensively cover your own ass, and gather evidence that absolves you, specifically, of wrongdoing first.

If you are reporting time worked as anything other than the actual number that you were working, that is illegal. So alternately, start reporting the actual hours worked. If your employer makes an issue of it, tell them that you will need a signed, written copy of any order they give you that instructs you to violate the law.

If you get fired, you can retaliate by getting someone sent to jail.

Which brings us back to the issue of the spider and the butterfly. Do you just make your peace that the butterfly will be tortured to death, or do you intervene, thus indirectly causing the spider to die a torturous death of starvation?

You possess an either infantile and misinformed understanding of Marx, or you're just being ideological here. Have you read Capital? It's not just one book. Marx very well understood the concept, role, and agency of capital. His careful inspection did not reveal a conspiracy theory; instead, it elucidated the ways capital influences our material existence. There was no conspiracy among capitalists, only naturally flowing consequences of capital's impact on the material bases of society.

Please describe what "risks" the average high-flying tech startup CEO has taken.

Because it's so hard to adapt CEO skills to the jobs market? Whilst peons can pick up a low paid job and should just lap it up and be happy about it??

If the founder is taking a risk running the company then the employees are taking a risk working there; their risk is often as great, the chance to lose one's livelihood.

To my mind a guy in sales that wrote up £1 million of orders in one days work and a guy in janitorial that cleaned the toilets all day both did a days work and both deserve a days pay - they're both humans who gave a day of their lives to the purposes of the company.

Just look around you, most of the tech titans are founders who took risk, can you give examples of tech cooperatives which are equally famous?