For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it.<p>At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It wasn&#x27;t very much.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why people pay me so much, but I&#x27;m glad they do because I get to do what I love (programming, not not shipping), and I get to live off of that at the now rare and fading middle class standard of living.