That's actually a very interesting point of view. It's also interesting that you bring the Japanese into this. While they certainly to care a lot about produci

That's actually a very interesting point of view. It's also interesting that you bring the Japanese into this. While they certainly to care a lot about producing high quality work, they also have one of the world's highest suicide rates. I understand taking pride in what you build. However: 1) it's important to not let that destroy the rest of your life 2) it's a lot easier to take pride in what you build when you're working on something you own[0]. As I believe I alluded to in other comments on this thread, and was kind of insinuating with the original comment that you replied to, deciding that extra effort spent on a dysfunctional enterprise project micro-managed by 3 competing orgs who spend their time changing requirements in order to win minor political victories (yes, this is an extreme example, please bear with me) is better spent on a personal open-source project, or even building something like a sport club or happy family seems to be the logical course of action when you care about what you build. Which isn't to say don't do the best you can at work - ship the code they ask you to ship, write it well, add unit tests, all that jazz. But then once that's done, you can either focus on being the best employee for Megacorp, which is likely to be soul-crushing, because you'll have extremely little reward for your effort, or you can be the best employee of You, LLC, where you natural human desire to make something beautiful can express itself in a way that is much more rewarding for you, both financially and emotionally. [0] https://paulgraham.com/own.html https://paulgraham.com/own.html