> Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never

> Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies You seem to be implying that less intelligent or educated people have LESS job security risks to worry about than the "cognitive one percenters"? You can't be serious. Are you confusing "risk" with "choice"? Going down that scale, it's "choice in finding a job" that gets reduced, not "risk of having to find a new job". Or maybe you're confusing the "job security risk" of losing that really nice intellectually challenging job and having to pick a possibly less interesting one from a number of companies that are jumping up and down because intellectual talent like that is never on the job market for long, with the ACTUAL job security risk of losing your job, period. And the subsequent worries about where next month's rent will have to come from. And the "right now" part has me scratching my head as well. From what I'm seeing, if there's one sector that seem to be coasting along just fine in this turmoil of economic crises, it's the tech sector and in particular the highly intelligent top of it. My friend for instance, is a brilliant programmer with a sharp analytical mind, only just about to finish his Physics PhD, already found a job, had to look for, oh, about a week or so. He had at least 3 options (he indeed picked the most intellectually challenging one), the reason it was "only" three was because he doesn't really want to move (this university town is a bit of an "island", most people have to move to other regions "where all the jobs are"), he limited his options by choice. Now compare with his girlfriend. Equally smart, but no background in programming and her PhD is in Bio/Med. She's already had to move to be able to take a temp research position and has been looking for more stable employment for months, without much luck. ... and one other, unrelated thing, the following can be pretty dangerous advice: > Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home. I can't speak for how it works where OP lives, but this won't fly in the Netherlands. Regardless of whether you rewrite it from scratch, code that you could conceivably have written as part of your normal work description (yes this is pretty broad), you don't own that. Doesn't matter one bit when or where you write it, at home or at the office, whether you made money from this hobby project or volunteered to write a simple database app for your local sports club (that last example is literally a casus we learned about in class). It's a snag, usually won't give you trouble because a boss doesn't need to enforce it, esp if he wants to keep his programmers. But what you're suggesting is deliberately placing yourself in an adversarial position, it depends on how you do it, but the tone you described it, can easily push someone to become very difficult, very quickly.