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Comment by john_horton | Hacker News Reader

According to the Pew Research Center, 89% of people who are not self-employed report being "completely" or "mostly" satisfied with their work; the percentage for the self-employed is even higher, at 95%.

http://pewsocialtrends.org/2009/09/17/take-this-job-and-love...

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I have my doubts about this - as a previous poster mentioned, ego is a huge part of it, so my suspicion is that you are going to get a pretty extreme bias when you let people self-report on this.

Around me, I do not believe 9 out of 10 people I know are "completely" or "mostly" satisfied with their jobs. The number if substantially less.

"...you are going to get a pretty extreme bias when you let people self-report on this."

How else are you going to find out if someone's happy with their job?

I've worked for my self in the past and now I'm working for a company; doing web dev (Drupal). I'm happier working for a company than when I was working for my self. Sure I don't have the crazy flexible hours anymore but then again no one else did either so it was hard to take advantage of that aspect of it; plus if I really need to do something I can usually take a 3 hour break in the middle of the day. (I'm single so this might change if I where married with children).

The nice thing about working for a company is the whole thing is not 100% riding on me & there are other dev's who can "cover" for you. I can also focus more on what I like to do vs when I worked for my self where I did everything; even the parts I sucked at but the clients like you so much they insist that you be the one doing it.

Long story short, I like working for "the man" and am quite happy with where I'm at.

But you have seen both sides of it (so have I). For everybody else faraway hills are green: "Oh if only I wasn't working for the man, then things would be great". So this guys article just completely ignores what some people discovered thousands of years ago, namely that most people need to get a grip on themselves and "make up their minds to be happy".

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