The purpose of commercial employment is to do something useful for others, not personal enjoyment and self fulfillment. Obviously, enjoyment and self fulfillmen

The purpose of commercial employment is to do something useful for others, not personal enjoyment and self fulfillment. Obviously, enjoyment and self fulfillment can be coincidentally found at work, and there is nothing wrong with considering that as a factor in addition to compensation. But if you really want to 100% enjoy hacking, set time aside for a hobby. Retro programming like MS-DOS is one example where you will never be tempted to compromise fun for other considerations, since there is no practical or even charity market for end results. Plus, inherent platform limitations severely restrict bigger picture software engineering. Put it another way, say you found a hacking-only job. Would you enjoy commute, having to show up on time when tired, layoff worries, reprimands from manager, inevitable coworkers with personality issues? The only way is to code without commitments to others. Ironically, once you got your hacking fix in, you might reach a point where you run into limitations of coding without plan and structure and start appreciating early design reviews to avoid wasted work / code reviews to avoid get bogged down by a week of debugging that could have been an hour of hardening.