Nice discussion! Just too many things happening IRL that I can only skim through the posts, let alone replying...
Calling yourself a wage slave for too long means you really need to change something in your life. Not all people can achieve getting enjoyment from work. Some are incapable, others lazy, others just unlucky, although I don't really believe luck can fully define someone. One can make his/her own luck in life, or he/she falls into the "incapable" category. But at least you've got to try. If you fail, try again, and if you fail again, maybe you're not able to do it, or you need to re-evaluate your goals, and Bitcoin can help in such cases, but not everyone is in this situation. Not everyone is a wage slave.
True. But the actual work of one's career can also change drastically over time, to become much less meaningful.
For example, when I first got into IT programming in the mid 90's, the work was actually very meaningful and fun. We were building business software applications from complete scratch, and there was a sense of passion, creativity and analysis in what I was doing day to day. Programmers could use their brains to bang out code to build custom use cases and custom UIs, were respected and revered, and got paid accordingly for their creative analysis and technical knowledge.
By the time I got out of that career in the 2010's, IT programmers were reduced to simply integrating off-the-shelf, expensive closed-source software into existing business environments. They essentially became glorified software "babysitters", having to spend their days trying to integrate and debug software that was poorly-written by someone else, often with poor performance, poor configuration, archaic APIs, missing or incomplete documentation, lack of expertise, etc. And these software integrations were often initiated under ridiculous time schedules and low/inadequate budgets, with use-case and performance expectations that could not be met in the time allotted. Or ever. It became soul-crushing work, and I started having bouts of anxiety and depression that I never had in the beginning of my IT career.
What the IT career became in the end, was not something I had signed up for in the beginning.
So I got out.I hear you, and I agree. I'm also involved in s/w (mostly f/w) development, as part of my embedded designs, to which I also design the h/w. It's Sunday and I'm currently working on a driver for a project. A driver that was supposed to be ready and available for me to use as part of a ready-made SDK library. Well, it "kind of" works. But in my line of work, "kind of" is unacceptable. Little things like not strictly adhering to timing specifications and thus causing it to fail when communicating with certain rare ICs, or not being flexible enough to do exactly what I want, have forced me to design my own driver. As with most things, if you want to do it right, do it yourself.
I see this as a blessing in disguise though. I enjoy diving deep into the h/w and writing bare metal f/w for it. So, the lack of quality s/w libraries/drivers gives me an opportunity to do exactly that. Sounds like I'm a masochist, but I do enjoy low-level programming, as it improves my understanding of the h/w and makes it much easier to debug or extend my design's functionality. My employer believes in me and has given me total freedom to manage my projects, so I can decide on what approach to take in my designs. And I take the purist approach, i.e., if it doesn't work as it should, write/design it yourself from scratch.
Having to work on poorly written s/w, having to integrate it into my projects, no, I would avoid it at all costs. It's going to be a hell of a mess to maintain and upgrade, and probably won't perform as good as a project that was designed from the ground up. There is a cost to designing everything yourself though, which is that development may take longer than expected, but this is OK with me and my employer, so I take my time. And the quality of the final design more than makes up for it.
"So I got out", you said. That's what I mean by
not being a wage slave. You saw that you were becoming one, so you decided to change things. Wage slavery is when you are afraid to make changes and endure a life of misery by spending half your life doing things you don't want to do, especially when you
know you can do much better. I consider myself blessed in that respect, because I'm currently getting paid very well to do things so interesting and exciting that I would gladly pay for to do. But if things go south and I feel I need to change something, I will certainly try to change it.
@sassal0x
