Interview with the man who built Google's V8 engine from scratch
Key Takeaway : If you are <i>really really good</i> at what you do, companies will pay you to work out of home, writing Open Source code, from scratch, at your own pace, on your own terms.<p>For the rest of us there is always enterprise systems and cube farms. :-(. Yeah Ok I am just depressed at how much other programmers are better than me :-(<p>More seriously though, I wouldn't have thought that there is such a "market" for  expertise in writing VM s. Of course you probably get to be that good by not caring how much of a "market" there is to doing the things you love.<p>"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. " - PG  in his essay "How to Do What You Love"