When you have kids, bills, trying to save for retirement, etc. I can’t afford to be out of work for an extended period of time. Even making $120K a year (just trying to make the math easy), means every month I am out of work I am losing $10K.

But I was replying to this...

If you’re qualified to write that kind of code, basic needs are surely well taken care of and are the least of your concerns.

The Mozilla developers aren’t getting paid minimum wage by any means, nor am I doubting their skills, but they definitely aren’t making the salaries of great engineers if levels.fyi is accurate.

That was my entire point. I wouldn’t get past the first technical screen for an entry level software engineer at $BigTech without “grinding leetCode ((tm) r/cscareerquestions) as a CRUD developer, but I made about that much even before I got a consulting job at $BigTech and I am living on the opposite coast from Silicon Valley.

Well, the key is that you trade your time for something and — if it is indeed harder to find a fulfilling work — you wish to maximize that something in a time you do work in order to be able to allocate more time towards more satisfactory ends.

I tried something like that. What happened was that the free time I had left was completely unproductive. Doing unfulfilling work is exhausting, turns out.

Not saying I have all the answers, just what happened to me. This fulfilling thing is hard.

Billions of people go to work everyday without doing it out of “passion”.

Sure, we’re extremely privileged.