I will say when I was younger and started in tech I stuck around the office until 9pm every day, then I’d get beers with my coworkers. I was learning so much more than I ever did in school, and doing projects that were really fun, and I made a ton of money for myself and the company (I did not get paid near what I was worth though).

Now, after many many years, the jobs aren’t challenging anymore, and the interesting work has been split up and blocked by organizational bureaucracy (you can’t do that because it would need a team of X to build, Y to deploy, Z to support, all when the job could be a 150 line Python script with 15 mins a week maintenance).

I’ve tried startups and they’re fun, the last one my shares got diluted vastly cutting my pay, and I have friends who got acquired for less than their options cost them, taking a loss. It’s not so fun working overtime for the VCs to snatch your tickets right from your hand.

Now I’m back at a big corp again, where I spend my time optimizing tiny levers in a vast machine to make a few more bucks here and saving a few there, organizing it all by multiplying 12 columns of a spreadsheet and putting in bullshit targets.

Nowadays I wish I could work 9 to noon for how much mental energy I have.