Besides, who is not a cog in some wheel or other? In civilized countries, there is nobody who is at the top of all hierarchies, no King. It's a pejorative with no bite if it applies to all.
The poster seemed to be distinguishing not on the basis of interdependence but on the basis of who has control over your life and the context of your work, and where the resulting profit would go. (This is, of course, my reading).
One part is your freedom. If you want to take a trip for a couple weeks once a year, or change your hairstyle or get a tattoo, and this is impossible because of company regulations unrelated to workload, this is coggy. Of course, everyone acknowledges that you have to work a certain amount of time and that if you are facing employees it helps not to have a swastika tattoo on your forehead, etc.
Another part is the alignment of what you are doing with your interests. If you are putting in 60 hours to pay the bills and learn a lot about SOAP on the way, that's coggy; it is not the same as choosing work that involves SOAP because it gives you a hard-on, which is less coggy.
Another part is what determines the broader role your work plays. Yes, everyone is doing work which fits into other people's wants (even the arctic explorer is playing to an audience somehow). But if you work for 8 months on something and it fails because customers hate it, you were still the one who chose that context - less coggy. It was trying an idea. If you work for 8 months and then it is permanently scrapped because the company came to a deal with Microsoft and your project was just a bargaining chip, that's coggy.
For the same reason, profits - if you are working in Hollywood and get paid an incredibly tiny amount for a hit movie because they got you with Hollywood accounting, that is coggy; it's less coggy if your profit is tied
Of course, this also means it's less coggy if you are taking on greater risk (financial, reputational, whatever). If you are very risk averse then you may prefer a coggier position. If you are very focused on one specialized skill, a less coggy position might force you to pick up other ones, so again certain kinds of people will rationally prefer coggier positions.
If the norm is for employees to be hired at low rates, dominated in every way possible, artificially hampered from building useful things, and fired on a dime, that is pretty coggy. If you are happily choosing your own jobs, leaving when you want, dictating terms, that isn't very coggy. Which is why you used it as your example.
The accusation of him being a cog without any apparent basis for flinging that accusation is what set me off, and made me use the word "screeching". You appear to have simply expanded on my point that there are ways of being more and less coggy, which is nice, but you seem to think you were arguing against something I said, though I can't find what. Yes, I already said there's a general point that could be made there, but the point wasn't made without a heaping helping of presumptions.
The reality is there are very few people making six figures writing their own iphone apps. Even fewer that can sustain that level of income as a sole proprietorship for a couple of decades, which is what you will need to do to retire at fifty.
For every programmer who does create a sustainable business, fewer still get rich doing so. One reason, creating a wildly successful business is a completely different skill set from programming. Another reason, it takes a fair amount of luck for a company to become wildly successful.
Goog luck.
Great Fredudian typo, or greatest Freudian typo?
The man has been doing a job that he loves for 30+ years. Having had to work in places I hated to 'pay the bills' enough times in my life to grow weary of it, I understand the value of working on a good team with people I like and respect, doing what I love.
As the adage goes: Get a job doing what you love to do, and you'll never work a day in your life. Startups are fine and dandy, but trust me when I tell you, they're a ton of WORK. Even serial entrepreneurs will tell you that it's taxing, and not for everyone. I for one would be much happier nestled up to a keyboard, solving a problem than I would be doing many of the things one needs to do to make a startup viable.
In summation, everybody's priorities are not the same as yours, and I'd wager that you could stand to learn that lesson sooner than later.
Achievement is what you feel inside. A large bank account is nice validation of a certain class of achievements, but not the only kind.
If you do something that gives you no kicks and only pays your bills, then yes, throwing away that nasty but necessary source of subsistence feels liberating.
But if you enjoy what you're doing every day and have no problem getting up in the morning for that, you only want more, and "retirement" feels like having your favorite toy taken from you.
Imagine someone saying: "Mr. Tesla, when are you planning to retire from your burdensome and soul-crushing experimentation and retire to enjoy some front porch whistling?"
If you want to build big things, in most cases you can't work alone. In a big team, everyone plays a part. Call them a "cog" if you want.
And, sometimes the specialization that happens in big teams allows people (err...cogs) to really push the state of the art by engaging one hard problem for a long time.
People don't get rich by simply taking from others (OK with a few exceptions); they get rich by offering something that another person/business/etc sees as a benefit worth paying for.
I'm pretty glad I realized what this article is talking about early on and started planning long term for my own exit, as I knew my tolerance for this was a finite resource that would be continually depleted.
And a programmer today earns enough to be able to do so at a good age.
Why not build your own achievements?