[jdowner]

I can say that this is true for me. I like helping people but I get my motivation from feeling that I have solved a problem well. Maybe it is the nature of the kind of software I tend to write, but I'm not all that interested in whether it is used by millions of people or purportedly helps a bunch of people. That's nice, it's just too far removed from the work for me to be motivated by it. The bonus is that I also don't have an issue if something I've worked on is scrapped for whatever reason, and I know that that is something that some people have a hard time coping with.