There's no paradise anywhere. I've been self-employed for 13 years in a rather niche area, as an involuntarily solipsistic army of one for lack of ability to gr

There's no paradise anywhere. I've been self-employed for 13 years in a rather niche area, as an involuntarily solipsistic army of one for lack of ability to grow my business. Most of my customers are highly technical, but don't understand what I do quite enough to have a "lines of code" resolution on it. I wish they _would_ ask me why those two lines took two days (in my case, it might be simple burnout; been coding for too long, and longer than a more conventional career track would have prescribed). Instead, nobody much cares whether I write 2 lines of code or 2000; same difference to them, and boils down to the all-important "delivering". There's some intellectual and creative freedom in that which I suppose folks don't have with a code-involved boss who scrutinises their commits. But the opposite--nobody scrutinising your commits--isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. I almost never have to explain why I did something a certain way to anyone, not because I'm so important and command so much distinction or recognition of my expertise, but because nobody gives a crap. :-)