[muhfuhkuh]

But "haggling over a car, getting sick, stuck in traffic, selling stuff" are minor annoyances compared to sitting at a desk for at least 6 hours every day, 5 days a week, 261 days a year working on what amounts in your mind to be absolute BS.

And, this is coming from someone who works a 9-to-5 (albeit from home, which I believe helps IMMENSELY), and who is working on starting his second business (the first one was totally misguided and I had no heart for the industry, so it sorta fizzled out). I don't want to quit because the work sucks, I dig it just fine; I just want to go my own way. That way, my complaints of low pay, paltry vacation time, benefit shrinkage, or lack of a window overlooking cool stuff flow straight to someone who may listen and respond a little better.

[elblanco]

It's a pyramid. Lots of folks, particularly young people in my experience, don't really understand that you have to do lots of crap work in order to get to do the fun stuff. It's simply not possible to only do fun things, or if it is, I've never met anybody who was able to do it.

Most of the stuff you have to do to live is crap work nobody has a passion for or wants to do, then there's some measure that's tolerable, then a little bit that you look forward to, then there's a teeny tiny little bit up top that's awesome fun.

If you try and set unrealistic expectations that you only want to work on the teeny little bit that's fun, you'll always end up disappointed because the rest of the crap work supports you being able to do the fun stuff.

Of course, if your job never lets you experience any fun stuff, then what's the point? Move on. But don't expect you'll find a place that's only fun.

Even the craziest 90s dot-com companies, with pool tables, lava lamps, comfy chairs, top-of-the-line machines, liberal dog policy, etc. ended up not really being terribly fun places to work in the end, because they forgot to do the crap work that nobody wants to do.

This phenomenon actually manifests itself in a very real way in the open source world. Nobody actually wants to write device drivers or boot loaders or other such drudgery, so that stuff simply doesn't get worked on. What we end up with then is upteen million shells, window managers, audio subsystems, and other junk yet nobody can get their wireless card to work. (okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but until the open source world found itself corporate sponsors, lots of necessary but boring stuff simply didn't get built).

[xentronium]

I don't believe your example with opensource is relevant, because most people in opensource don't get money for what they do, thus, it's fair that they're looking for fun stuff.