Upvoted because even though I hate cynicism, it just hits me from time to time. I just am not motivated by mentoring or entering timesheets or working on projec

Upvoted because even though I hate cynicism, it just hits me from time to time. I just am not motivated by mentoring or entering timesheets or working on projects I give no fucks about or being coerced into giving time estimates for problems I don't even understand yet. And all of that baggage too often outweighs the real joy I get from building things in the unlimited universe of the binary machine. I miss feeling like an inventor, like I've got infinite Lego blocks and a vast, empty dining room table (that Mom doesn't need for a couple days). Instead, I get just the microjoys of building a new web page from scratch with nice messages and useful validation, or a really well-normalized set of tables, or gosh, if I'm lucky, a really reusable, self-documenting library which I've been allowed to write The Right Way. I'd love to work at a Valve or a Github, where programmers work on whatever they want, but how many of those are there? And I'd love to work for myself, except for the overhead of busywork that goes along with it.