> Most days, I do not have to interact with anyone from work, not even customer contact. The most satisfying job I had as an software engineer had me working s

> Most days, I do not have to interact with anyone from work, not even customer contact. The most satisfying job I had as an software engineer had me working side by side with other amazing engineers, the types of people who have Wikipedia articles about the stuff they've accomplished in life. Plenty of people work jobs earning less $ if they have an amazing group of people to work with. Sitting side by side with someone who is a catalyst for brilliance is worth a lot, because it adds a lot to your level of personal fulfillment. > I work from home. My job is technically interesting, and I still learn/improve. How much do you improve? How hard have you stretched yourself? I've worked with people who made me go far beyond what I thought I could ever do. That was technically interesting. Learning how to read clock diagrams and calculate memory access latencies to see if my algorithms could even run, that was technically interesting. Working until 11pm at night listening to metal music sitting side by side with another engineer as we tried to write gesture recognition algorithms on a capacitive touch sensor that only had 6 pads (lol), that was interesting (and frustrating). Do I enjoy my 9-5 now? Sure. But it isn't satisfying. Pushing the industry forward is satisfying. Building foundational technologies is satisfying. Fighting tooth and nail to make technology do the impossible, that is satisfying.