Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)

The consequence: every software job requires 5 years experience in $TRENDY_FRAMEWORK rather than 10 years of generalist experience. But, hey, we'll quiz you on hash table implementation to pretend we're on the cutting edge!

We're making our day-to-day jobs worse. Stop it.

I can give you a few advices (with your intelligence you are aware of them anyway though might not have been acting on them so far): 1) start your own business(es) that can be automated to a large extent. You'd spend 1 hour a day running it, making adjustments and in time it would grow to sustain you 100%. There are still a plenty of areas you can focus at, you might have avoided them because they are "easy", or "anyone could do that", "uninteresting" etc. Yet they give you a recurring income that would give you freedom to pursue whatever you want to do. 2) accept (and give) only partnerships when working with someone, on fair terms 3) do a reasonable long-term investing, 80% "stable", 20% risky or whatever reasonable ratio suits you 4) when forced to work on something due to economical circumstances, sudden change of directions due to acquisition etc. with which you can't agree, stop using your emotions there and do the average expected work, while preserving energy and attention to your future opportunities 5) retain your integrity. Compromising yourself weakens you immensely 6) make sure you are on top of your game all the time - get excellent at chosen difficult MOOCs, do some new thing with an utmost focus (arts?), anything where you can get a real feedback about your capabilities and progress

You should understand you hold enormous power even as an individual. Perhaps because of your past generosity or good will you didn't use it or were led to believe that you can't do a lot of things - I think your subconsciousness is rebelling to such thoughts, hence the strong reactions you have. You can literally bring whole companies to the ground if you wish to, or create something unique that empowers others in a good way. Most people become mediocre, uninspiring, "happiness" pursuers, take some kind of blue pill, yet still thinking they have the best ideas, are brilliant, master minds etc. They will never understand what is going on once you start utilizing your mind to improve some small part of life for everyone.

The fact is, corporate-labor relations is not a monolith. Although some (or even most) participants in the labor market may be engaged in betray-betray behavior today, that doesn't mean that such relationships are universal or will come to dominate the labor market over time. Given that tit-for-tat is theoretically the most successful strategy, companies that adopt generous performance-based policies with their employees should enjoy long-term competitive advantage against any rivals who have chosen less-friendly employee policies. If this model is predictive, the advantages of a "betray only" strategy for corporations will be relatively short-lived, because the inevitable betray-betray relationships will make such companies less competitive than entities that adopt a "tit-for-tat" strategy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

Why is that your definition of success?

"Having the resources to implement my own ideas" is daft; I very likely don't have any (new) ideas worth implementing. How many people have lived since the early days of the industrial revolution? Call it 20 billion[1]. How many genuinely useful not too niche machines have been invented and programs written, not counting the same program reinvented over and over and over. Tens of thousands? A million? There just aren't enough new things for everyone to invent.

So instead of new ideas, maybe I/we could reimplement existing ideas - do something that someone else has done, in our own way. But how is that significantly different from "being a tool in someone else's box"?

Elon Musk makes cars, he's got control over his own destiny! He's following his dream! He's not a tool in someone else's box, he's not pushed around by others political games! That's success!

Wait, he's not pushed around by others' political games? Tesla cars have to meet all kinds of regulations. Tesla the company does too, for accounting, finance, taxes, advertising, customer interaction, etc.

The cars have to have pedals and a steering wheel or no customer would be able to drive them. They have to fit on a road, and behave in common car-like ways or no customer would have use for them. They have to look like a car or no customer would recognise what they are or wouldn't want to be seen with one. They have to be petrol, diesel or battery powered because there isn't anything else they could be that fits all the lots-of-requirements.

And yet you say "It's not money that makes Elon Musk a success, it's because he has the freeodm to shape the doors his way!".

But he doesn't have the freedom to shape them his way, he has the freedom to shape them like car doors and nothing else.

A false sense of freedom is a strange definition of success.

You could find as much limited freedom while working for someone else.

[1] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...