Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

I'm not primarily a financially motivated person. And I would prefer to spend my time doing something interesting. But in my experience, taking on some one else's projects that are interesting but not well paid has always gone badly.

Positions are usually low paid for one of two reasons: either there isn't a budget for it, or there is but they're being cheap and cutting corners. If there isn't a budget, that's a sign of a failing organization or a bad startup idea, so probably not a job you should take. If they're being cheap, that's a sign that they don't respect or value the people doing the work, which is a huge red flag.

I've taken jobs that were essentially volunteer work because I got to work on projects that were interesting to me. I've also taken jobs that weren't that interesting to me which paid generously. In the end, much of my volunteer work wasn't valued, and seen as disposable. The more highly paid work never got interesting, but having a decent amount of money took off a lot of the financial stress and ultimately made me happier and enabled me to spend more of my free time on things that interested me.

At this point, no matter how interesting, there are only two people I would do underpaid work for: myself, and my grandmother.

I think the part that needs to be factored into your analysis is the volatility/risk aspect. A mortgage may be relatively low ROI but it’s also relatively low risk compared to the market. E.g., maybe somebody has a certain percentage invested into low risk bonds. Maybe it makes sense to pare back some of that and put it towards their mortgage during a period when bonds are being crushed. Neither bonds or the mortgage return will compete with a general index fund in terms of return over a long period of time, but the index fund is in a different (higher) risk category

You do owe labor in return for money though, unless you're an entitled tech or crypto bro who has grown up in a bubble without any understanding of how the other 99% of people live their lives (by just scraping by).

I'd also suggest people making these requests to try and expand their interests to make themselves more rounded and valuable. For example I'm totally the kind of person that likes to jump from one thing to another cause I like the challenge and I get bored quick otherwise. But instead of jumping ship cause the challenge is gone I try to find a different closely related challenge.

Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the same:

1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn in order to investigate or solve those problems.

2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile areas for improvement.

3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting. Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly define and potentially work on to improve.

I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought of, all while always jumping between things and not getting bored!

(edit: formatting)

I definitely don't begrudge anyone who likes documentation - but we all have different parts of the dev cycle that we like - some folks love to architect solutions and hate implementation because of the fiddly bits and details - other people dislike the stress of having to come up with overarching approaches and get analysis paralysis but when it comes to splatting out the vision into code it's meditative. Still other folks love to break things and enjoy needling edge cases in unit tests (if you find one of these or are one of these - know their value, they are a hot commodity). Then other folks love the teaching/explaining part that comes with documentation.

I think that there is a way we can improve as an industry to let more people specialize into their niches (which would move us closer to a factory/assembly line sort of setup) but right now most developers are artisans that receive some vague ticket and produce code and everything for it as a result.