"The thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. - Einstein

I think most people on HN could relate to this quote. Like it or not, as professional developers, we rarely create, but simply refine. It was fun at the start of my career, but now my professional life seems rather unimaginative.

Upmodded for this splendid morsel of malicious British wit:

That's right — LeWeb was entirely without the web. Which I suppose makes it simply "Le".

Lisa Simpson: "As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs."

Marry a doctor or lawyer.

Personal reminiscences warning: One of the weird things about my digg experiences was where I sat in the conference hierarchy. Kevin would go to London (FOWA), Paris (LeWeb), etc, and listen to a bunch of other fake people talk about fake stuff. They sent me to 2 conferences. Webmasterworld in Las Vegas, which was all SEO, lots of hustlers, the best party I've ever been to (a Yahoo party in the Hugh Hefner suite at the Palms), met Matt Cutts; and then they sent me to Reflection/Projections in Urbana-Champaign (why would we want to go there?) - which included Steve Yegge and Randall Monroe (XKCD), and was probably the best conference I've ever been to. You pose, poseurs gather around you. You get pushed into the background, you meet lots of interesting people.

Investors haven't stopped investing. In fact the record series A valuation for a YC-funded company was set just a few weeks ago.

Even if investors did stop investing, it wouldn't kill us. At the last Demo Day, 4 of the companies presenting were already profitable. (All 4 have had offers of investment, incidentally.) At the next Demo Day the ratio of profitable companies will be even higher.

As for his alternative suggestion, among other problems, it wouldn't give startups any more runway. There's no reason to suppose that if we got into the real estate business, we could offer space to startups any cheaper than they can get it on the open market.

Probably because you're more likely to be unhappy with the state of things if you understand them well.

Argumentless linkbait. I want my thirty seconds back.

Taking care of kids is a lot of work...

They took the images from the brain, but they might not have gotten it from the mind - it may have come for circuitry associated with the eyes, rather that the circuity associated with thinking.

I would like to see if they could read images if a person just thought about them, rather than actually saw them.

The real title of this should be "The traditional employment model sucks", and I agree with that statement.

I spend 60+ hours a week on the clock as a Japanese salaryman. It kills me. It kills everyone else even more than me because a) I'm the slacker American who actually leaves after a mere 60 hours and b) I don't have a wife and kids.

And looking at my paystub, oh boy, the incentives at the margin make me weep. Monetarily and otherwise. A starting Japanese engineer makes $2,200 a month plus biannual bonuses of something like $4,000 plus benefits. I've got 4 years professional experience so I'm above that but not grossly above it and, anyhow, treble it and it wouldn't make a difference.

The incentive at the margin, on a professional level, is to spend one hour slowly working through the 473rd unit test case on a feature that will be used once a year that isn't crucial to any client anywhere. The feature exists largely to keep up the appearance that the company is working hard for their money. I love programming but I don't love this programming.

The incentive at the monetary level is, well, "less than motivational".

Now I also own a small business selling software. Its no great shakes, but I get to pick the features I implement and the marketing/etc direction I choose. And when I do stuff right, its not the 473rd bullet point on a spec that may never see the light of day, its fifteen paying customers sending me Christmas cards with pictures of their kids. Or if I kick butt and take names for two weeks, rather than getting a pat on the head from the boss, a new stack of busywork, and $60 added to my Christmas bonus (yaaaaay), my sales increase by $400 a month FOR FOREVER.

Is it easy? I don't think anything worthwhile is easy: I've been part-timing this for 2.5 years now and am just creeping into the $20k a year sales range. But someday, in the not so distant future (certainly not 5 years from now like the slideshare presentation suggests), it will be enough. (It actually would cover my burn rate at the moment but I'm a bit of a cautious type.)

And then I will calligraphy-up my resignation letter, make my bows, and walk out of the office while the sun is still shining for a change.

And, as God is my witness, that will be the last time I ever deal with a company as an employee. If they want to be business partners, we can be business partners. If they want me to live my life for them out of a sense of obligation, ho ho ho, I will be happy to introduce them to service providers who are more appropriate to their needs.

(This isn't really a Japan-only thing, incidentally. There are any number of American companies which could be my company, easily. And there are Japanese companies which are better but, really, none is ever going to be as good to me as I would be.)

Have you considered that you might enjoy your own business more, thus making the "hate working" part no longer so true?

I'm on a shorter time scale than you. I consulted from 14 to 20, when I had a bit of a trainwreck of bad luck and choices all at once, then I held 3 jobs: one for 3 mos, one for a year, and one for 15 mos. I quit each when I got to the point you're describing. I've been consulting again since Sept 07, thinking that charging the premium rates would help limit my exposure to bad customers and boring work. It hasn't, really (I'm charging "hundreds" per hour as you say).

But it has given me the flexibility to ship my first real product. And I'm actually having a blast. And I'm not working balls-to-the-wall like the expected YC work ethic. We built v1 in 3 mos, a couple days a week, and we've already got a small stable of happy paying customers... with almost zero promotion.

Even the boring and unsavory stuff (bug fixes, answering tickets!) is more fun when it's something you're passionate about.

Maybe you're not anti-WORK, but anti-job?

That said, if you've learned a bunch doing what you were doing, why not try to sell software or do low-commitment micro-consulting or write about it for a subscription site?

That was the best conference write up I've ever seen.