Engineering hard

Wait till you learn about how the Fed creates money

If you want to kill passion for anything make it your job

For me it's the opposite: if your job is your passion, it doesn't feel like a job anymore!

May I ask approximately how old you are and what field you're working in? (Or, being passionate in?)

I feel like this is not a realistic view to sustain in most modern tech environments, unless you love inefficiently producing ineffective solutions that just so happens to be profitable, or you job hop every 1 - 2 years.

47 now

First company with 23, sold with 33.

Second + third company founded with 36, sold at 46.

I was the software engineer in the founders team, built alot by myself, even in the last years with a tech department of 30 people.

After doing nothing for 1.5 years, I am back with a new startup, being the only developer. Because I love it, and I am good at it!

It's my passion...

Interesting, thanks! I feel like that kind of confirms my position: you're not someone who has the same passion for coding, you have a stronger passion for building, leading and selling tech companies, which is why you've done that multiple times.

I've never been a founding engineer, but typically a direct report to founding engineers.

The people I worked with in your position were either like you (e.g. enjoyed programming but clearly got a big rush from the business and money side too) or they were genuinely just pure passionate programmers and miserable, as their role takes them away from that.

One option is to become a freelancer, there you usually get a new project every 6-18 months in my experience.

There's a whole categories of skills, abilities and problems that are never confronted if a person changes job every <2 years.

Hot take: what if the rise in enshittification and crap tech is because good tech can only be produced with the hindsight of a stable tech career from a stable tech employer?

That's a different topic though. This was about passion in coding for living.

I don't think it's the employee's responsibility to stay in one company if the stability and in-house career path options are questionable, as usually is the case.

If your job is your passion, and your downstream customers give you freedom to treat it as such, it can be fun.

The fun gets sucked right out of it when you have people breathing down your neck waiting for your output, are very particular about what they expect from it in a way that doesn't align with your creative values, etc.

Not all of us have a Lord Saatchi willing to bankroll whatever our brains fart out and call the result brilliant (likely to pump up its value to buyers). Matter of fact, that may just be what ZIRP-era VC can be conceptualized as: business model "Uber for Lord Saatchi-style patronage in tech".

1. Yeah, they weren’t good at reigning in spending in the 70s either.

The major shareholder is Mark so doing double dirty

At the imminent level. The tariff rate can and likely will go up.

Just say spelling

If I meant spelling, I would have said it.

Let me introduce you to Andrew Jackson

You’re a common shareholder

You never know on HN. Perhaps their last name is Nordstrom.