As a result of chasing interesting problems (and a stint as a university sysadmin), my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for most of my career.
I feel like this misses the point of the article. The author claims its important to enjoy what you're working on. They make no claims that doing so is a way to maximize your salary.
I know tech gets paid well now but that wasn't always the case. Decades ago people went into medicine or law or finance if they wanted to optimize for pay and prestige. Only relatively recently has tech joined that list.
And then you find yourself junior to someone who was getting 6 figures straight out of programming bootcamp three years ago. (And good luck trying to convince them that their genius idea has never actually worked.)
>It's hard to enjoy what you are working on after you realize it's going from your fingers straight to the trash.
I think this is more true of the two. Purposeful work is important to feeling fulfilled. Work that isn't appreciated isn't likely to leave one feeling like they have a purpose at work outside of generating a paycheck.
I think the other point is probably less wise. There will almost always be comparisons in which one falls short in terms of salary, even up to the billionaire class level. For me personally using that as a gauge is a recipe for constant unhappiness.
The whole convoluted story of Taligent and WorkplaceOS is something to behold.
It's a pity because the initial promise back in the early 90s was something I was genuinely excited about but alas, it was all promise and no shipping
> With protracted development spanning four years and $2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), the project suffered development hell characterized by empire building, feature creep, and the second-system effect.