What is the best part about being a Software Engineer?

I really appreciate this article. It feels like envy has become a major driver over the last few years in the US--it's obviously always been around, but now it feels like both an obsession and something that is broadly socially acceptable to indulge in.

Thinking about the good and what to be grateful for sounds like a much better recipe for happiness than things like the share-my-salary movement. (I'm not opposed to the latter. It may result in modest comp bumps but I doubt it leads to lasting happiness bumps).

Perhaps this is true if you 'can relocate to SF' + is american/won the h1b lottery, end up working in a company with 6 hours/day policies, 20% time and plenty of money to burn.

All other mortals are in a way or another struggling. Pulling all nighters(because it's expected), having long periods of stress + burnout.

The advantages I see are that the money is good and that people(me included) love programming. Having a job doing something you love is definitely a blessing. The biggest of them.

I couldn't agree more. Choose a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life!

This is the worst thing about this sort of "IQ dick-waving contest" culture, to me. I'd be fine with doing ridiculous CS Theory stuff in interviews, if the job was about doing that. I love that stuff, when my mind is geared into the right mode, and a job that required a lot of it would give me the ability to leave my mind geared into that mode. Instead, my mind has downshifted into the CRUD-dev gear from years of disuse, and you're asking me to shift it into high gear for the interview... only to shift back down for the work itself.

I get that every small company wants "the best and the brightest" in order to have more value on the table under acquihiring conditions, but there's really no reason that the person programming Facebook's Android frontend view-controllers needs to know how to answer doctorate-level category-theory questions.

I write software in-house for a company that does other things. The company has a strategy of bespoke software rather than using the industry standard software in order to get a competitive advantage (i.e. we can do things our competitors can't).

That means I get to not only work with bright developers but other bright people doing other jobs, learn about their jobs, help make their jobs easier and then move on to another area. Very few jobs offer you the ability to regularly switch the area you work in. It used to be claimed that a good manager could manage anything, I'd suggest that a good developer can design software for (almost) any industry.