[closeparen]

You should absolutely try to work for a monopoly if at all possible. Monopolies have the luxury of indulging smart people with big-budget pie-in-the-sky R&D projects and little to no short-term profitability or productivity discipline, which are just about the best possible working conditions for engineers. Also where you are most likely to make real progress on a serious problem that contributes to society, instead of being micromanaged hour by hour to make sure you stay on task in grinding out a sales-driven feature backlog for some enterprise bloatware no one needed.

[avmich]

> You should absolutely try to work for a monopoly if at all possible.

I did, and I agree that there are possibilities. They aren't nearly always available - R&D departments in Microsoft or Google are very different than their cash cow departments. I wonder if the former justify the latter. It's not enough, say, to be a PhD to get into those departments, so only minority of engineers can indulge themselves working there.