I met a guy who worked in the tech department of a large department store chain. He was one of a couple hundred programmers in a large cubicle farm. It was a pretty dead simple setup, each programmer got an assignment (generally COBOL maintenance, and new stuff was in C#, I think) that was due in 2 weeks. Rinse and repeat. Just like highschool or something. Anyway, he'd finish his "assignment" on day 1 and spend the next 2 weeks working on his own projects. Only made 40-50K, though (in the midwest).