Interview with the man who built Google's V8 engine from scratch
Key Takeaway : If you are really really good 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.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 :-(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."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"