Salary slavery and burnout

Browsing StackOverflow the other day, I came across this post. The meat of the post being this (added emphasis):

Regardless of the technology you work with, or the work you have to do, the thing that most makes a job suck or not suck, is these three things:

• The people you deal with daily
• The way in which the company rewards your success
• Your ability to feel as if your contribution is worthwhile

This got me thinking about something that's a bit of an elephant in the room: Purpose. Or more accurately - personal perception of purpose.

Let's face it - most software development jobs out there are actually pretty boring. We do it to pay the bills. Not very many of us are in a specific job that we find so interesting that we'd still be doing it if we won the lottery tomorrow. In a word - a lot of the software work out there is corporate drudgery - maintaining some boring business systems that you really have no deep personal interest in. So purpose in the "personal fulfillment" sense is often shaky at best.

The other aspect of it is what I call the "salary slavery" feeling. Essentially - it's quite common for corporate software developers to have little to no say about what they're working on. We are often treated like factory workers - simply taking orders and cranking out the work, no questions asked. Almost all autonomy, creativity, and self-actualising purpose stifled. To add insult to injury: no extra reward tied to how well we perform the job, or how well the product sells. It's quite typical to get the same reward (salary) for working just hard enough not to get fired, versus being 10X more switched on, productive, and putting in very long hours. On the same grain: it's typical to get the same salary (with at most some token bonus) when the product you're working on makes it big, versus when it's breaking even or even making a loss. Psychologically, this feels little different to slavery. Obviously it's not really slavery, because by becoming an employee it's what you signed up for voluntarily - but subconsciously, viscerally - it's very hard to watch your hard work being turned into huge rewards for someone else, while you get the same reward as before, or token extra crumbs at best.

It's quite easy to see why this would eventually wear a person down and lead to burnout. The answer seems simple too - start your own thing (startup). It sounds like Programmers' Paradise: working on your own idea that you have a personal interest in, using technology you like, having full ownership and full reward if it makes it big, etc.

It's also quite easy to see why more of us don't do it. Running your own business is hard work. But I don't think this is the main issue - the main issue is that it's quite scary to have full freedom to fail. That "same salary no matter what" mentality above is actually quite comforting and safe by comparison. You might be a slave, but you're a well-fed slave. Escaping out into the World and going it alone leaves you vulnerable - there are no guarantees you'll be able to feed yourself at all.