Yeah, money ruins everything eventually. My first true dev gig was for a really fun company. I was self taught at my previous engineering job, and the Web was

Yeah, money ruins everything eventually. My first true dev gig was for a really fun company. I was self taught at my previous engineering job, and the Web was happening so I took a junior position for $X/year. Then I got better fast. Turns out I wasn't actually all that junior to start with, but soon it was apparent that I was shipping things a lot faster than anybody else on the team. After a good year of this I took a look around the market and figured out where I would probably fit in it. I asked the company to bring me up to $2X to get me closer to where I belonged. They debated, scraped, and eventually found a way to offer me $1.3X. I was gutted. This was a really fun job, with fun people. But they were not planning to pay market rates, so in the end it was an easy decision. I sent off a couple emails, and a week later accepted another really fun job, with even more fun people, for a little more than $2X. So yeah, a nice relationship soured because fun is fun but at the end of the day, it's not worth leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table for. Especially when there's plenty of fun to be had elsewhere that doesn't ask you to make that tradeoff.