This is very true, and we need these moments. Lately I've been struggling to figure out where my place is, how to maybe get back into freelancing, what I'm technically good at etc... lots of ruminating since I've been out of work for a year.
But.. I met someone at the gym who's been struggling with an esoteric problem on an ancient piece of software for over a decade, and they approached me to ask if I could solve it. I said "maybe", sat on it for a few days, and then replicated the issue on my machine and solved their problem in about an hour. I asked for $50 and they gave me double, which was wildly more rewarding than being paid $100k to write react all year, not that that salary is on the table any longer.
$50 for a one off thing, for a gym buddy is fine. in the blue collar world, that would be a 'case of beer' for helping me out.
But in business, you need to charge an honest / fair amount. (sure, sometimes that 1 hour bug fix had $100K of 'value', but we could argue about honest / fair).
You mention being an employee at $100K a year. Double that, gives you a contractor rate of $100 an hour. That is the floor of what you should be asking floor; as in the absolute lowest. Another $50 or $100 an hour is still fair and honest in todays economy.
F-that! That's one of those times where I re-enact the scene from the Bond Golden Eye film where the guy jumps up extending both arms yelling "Yes! I am invincible!" Of course I totally expect the hubris to be short lived, just maybe not with liquid nitrogen
I've been known to inform people that the person that wrote the incredibly horrendous code that caused whatever problems to occur should be fired immediately knowing good and well that I was the only dev to write any of the code.
"Research shows" (I read long ago) that the happiest men are those take their wives' advice — that's certainly been true for my own N=1, for coming up on four decades now. I'd imagine we could replace "wives" with "spouses" and get comparable results.
I prefer "Why did I need to see this subtlest detail to resolve the bug, modern software sucks" and "Why do we not have better tools that would have prevented me from writing this bug in the first place, modern software sucks".
