It&#x27;s a whole pile of depends.  Particularly in your case it depends on what you love about programming.<p>The guy who rocks into a company, tells them they need to write everything in new-buzzword-framework and use bucket-with-holes-in-it-db is arguably creating negative value and if the world was fair, they&#x27;d be paying for the privilege to be there.<p>On the other hand, the guy who comes in and tries to deliver the product, makes resonably, albeit slightly boring, choices and focuses on creating the thing people want, but the product fails because of poor market fit, deserves to get paid.  It&#x27;s not their fault if business people haven&#x27;t done their jobs.