Title: I feel that I was lucky early in my career.  I got a job at an early-stage startup which bootstrapped with agency-style work.  I got a generous share in the company, so pumping out high quality work products very much directly contributed to my own interests.  I worked a lot, but at the end I was rewarded very well for this when we had an exit.<p>Since then I have failed to find an incentive structure which actually rewards programming.  I&#x27;ve worked inside of standard agile teams, and typically I can handle the tasks which management can prepare for work within a matter of a couple days if not a number of hours.  I&#x27;m not incentivized to excel in these environments, since I&#x27;m not rewarded more for producing output faster than the rest of the team, and there&#x27;s social consequences for making other programmers &quot;look bad&quot; and increasing management expectations.<p>In principal I would be happy to just finish my tasks, and then spend the extra time working on projects which interest me, but due to IP clauses in contracts, it&#x27;s not possible to do this during the many unused work hours without causing issues.<p>I have tried freelancing, but it seems that most clients want to have a time commitment.  So basically they want to have someone acting as an employee, but only for several months vs. a long term commitment.  So the same problems arise as you have with the FTE situation.<p>Currently I transitioned into management, just because I was <i>so bored</i> having to find ways to stretch several hours of work across multiple weeks.  I&#x27;m a fine enough manager, but it seems kind of silly since I have much more unique value I can add as a programmer of my experience relative to what I can do as a manager.<p>So basically I am a very prolific programmer, and I am capable of producing a very large amount of value per time on the keyboard.  It seems like there <i>must</i> be some way of monetizing this skillset, but I have yet to find it.
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