[noelwelsh]

Only had time to skim the article, but the section on work caught my eye. Like a lot of people I was fairly dissatisfied with my early career, but, luckily, as a programmer my job had some future prospects worth obtaining. I now really like what I do, and I've learned a bit about the nature of work. A few things come to mind:

0. The more competent you are at something, the more interesting it becomes. Expecting your first job to be interesting is setting yourself up for disappointment.

1. Autonomy, at least for me, is really important.

2. Nobody hires someone else to do the most interesting work available.

3. The best jobs aren't advertised. Visibility, or self-promotion, is important to some degree.

The awesome thing about computing is the capital costs are so low you can short circuit a lot of the career progression. You'll probably still make a mess of your first N years, which is why venture capital was invented ;-)

[samatman]

Perhaps I was fortunate in my career choices, but #2 is not my experience. Plenty of people are hiring for problems they don't fully understand and can't solve, or they wouldn't be hiring. Often enough, those are the interesting problems.