Modding this up. From the original post: working in business software typically means writing code to line a few peoples' pockets... You're talking like a pe

Modding this up. From the original post: working in business software typically means writing code to line a few peoples' pockets... You're talking like a person for whom earning money is some kind of option. In most of the world, "lining your pockets" is a necessary precondition for things like "eating" and "paying rent". Perhaps you need to get a job in a factory. (Not that this is always an easy thing to do, in the 21st-century USA.) I used to work in a factory, as part of an engineering team that was desperately trying to get a brand-new class of product to market. We were acutely aware that, if our product turned out to be unmanufacturable, everyone in our division -- from the local senior management to the hundreds of hard-working blue-collar folks who ran, fixed, and cleaned the equipment on the night shift -- was at risk of being laid off. In fact, just to inspire us, many of the folks at our local site got laid off anyway, thanks to the dotcom bust and the resulting slump in telecom. I'm proud of the software I wrote for that project. Not because it was particularly elegant -- which it was not -- but because it helped keep the fabs alive, the products alive, the company alive, and hundreds of American and Malaysian workers alive.