IMO, this article is much ado about nothing. There are plenty of companies that offer programmers interesting challenges. I dare say that most of us posting her

IMO, this article is much ado about nothing. There are plenty of companies that offer programmers interesting challenges. I dare say that most of us posting here work in such a company, or have before. For those programmers who are supposedly stuck in a hellish 9-5 mix of Javadocs and enterprise-grade XML and ETL and SOAP, consider, for a moment: 1. Are they really "stuck"? The market for programmers is massive; why should anyone be stuck in a job that they hate? Of course there may be risks -- big enterprises have steady pay, benefits, and much more certainty than the startup, but if you pick those advantages over taking a risk... well, you can't exactly claim to be stuck, now can you? :) 2. Are those jobs really "hellish"? Personally, I'd dislike them. But an unhappy programmer is an unproductive programmer, and companies can't survive being staffed by unproductive programmers. Is it that hard to believe that programmers exist that enjoy just chaining technologies together? In the end, there are far too many options out there for this "woe is our industry" type of post to really mean anything. But I'd propose, as a simple solution for people who hate their day jobs: go home and do something you find interesting. Maybe you can build a company around it. Maybe it gets you noticed by a cool company. But at least you're having fun.