> Being a programmer is fucking boring ... They want you to spend your time ... optimizing their databases

Honestly, I really fucking love optimising databases. I can't believe my luck that people want to pay me to do that sort of work for 8 hours a day.

To me, hell is having to define and defend my own problem. I would loathe running a startup - I love the feeling, instead, of having people come to me to solve their problems. Fortunately, I've managed to arrange a situation where enough of those problems are reasonably interesting to my apparently unusual tastes :-).

This is not meant as a dig against those who run startups, just a note from someone with a very different perspective.