| Not the person you're replying to, but I think there's a whole lot of mistaken assumptions in this comment. There is one employer in the world that will reliably give me work I care about and am happy to work on for its own sake, and that employer is myself. Unfortunately, I can't afford to hire myself full-time. I tried it once, and it turns out (unsurprisingly, given my career) that I'm interested in working on interesting infrastructure problems and not interested in building a product, let alone marketing or selling it. I got some PRs into an open source project and then I ran out of money. So no matter what I do, I have to settle for an employer I care less about. At that point, the choice of employer is just negotiation. Also, it turns out there are a handful of employers who pay really well - to the point where if I work a job I'm fairly happy with, I can then eventually save enough money that I can hire myself full-time for the things I care about. There is no hypocrisy here, and bluntly you're being scammed by your employer if you've let them convince you there is. The way the employer wants to treat you is to pay you money in exchange for services. That's it. Would you feel hypocritical if you were an Uber driver who took rides from people you didn't care about? Would you feel hypocritical if you were a barber who cut one person's hair, and then the next day you cut a different person's hair? I didn't make a vow of faithfulness to my employer, promising to be with them for richer or poorer, for better or worse. (And even that agreement is two-sided, and you can non-hypocritically break that agreement if the other party isn't holding up their end of the deal.) I signed an employment contract, promising them that I would do work for them and they would pay me, and that they could stop paying me at any time and I could in turn stop working for them at any time. |