> My future boss to be told me that he had an more or less fixed absolute upper limit he tries to keep employees payroll below

This is very interesting. I don't know the details, but does he adjust to inflation at the least?

Is it a service (as opposed to products) business you work with, if you don't mind me asking?

I honestly think he got the better end of the bargain. Multiple studies have shown that creative work can be sustained for no more than 6 hours on a regular basis, so he's getting all your productive hours, for less.

> travel to some cramped up office

Is the office really cramped up or were you just trying to make a point?

If the boss does not like to pay their employees and makes them sit in cramped up offices, I don't think any of the employees should hold a long term view at the company, regardless of how flexible the hours are.

Yes, there atleast one better company out there that will not only provide the same flexibility, but also respect.

> And since there is quite some time left I still have time to run my startup on 'spare time'

See above.

IP ownership concerns aside, someone is still getting the better side of your productive hours. However, we, programmers seem to end up in pretty terrible working environments, so I guess it could be worse.

I understand you are getting more time to unwind and connect with your family, but that's how things should be, instead of the exception.

In general, I am seriously disappointed by how we (programmers) have and continue to let hours be tied to the value we get compensated for.

Programming comes with ability to produce extreme leverage for the beneficiary: as in the ability to make multiple orders of magnitude of efficiency (if nothing else) gains.

I have had the opportunity to work on a few different domain verticals and have seen how simple (but efficient) programs can absolutely boost the margins of a business:

1. Telecom: Roaming fraud costs a lot of money to operators. Even today, leakage and fraud analysis is done mostly manually. In 2007, I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that applied statistics to not only detect but predict roaming fraud. This ability would have required way more human resources ($$$) than a team of few programmers were able to achieve. Affected the bottomline directly.

2. Healthcare: A certain chain used to run reporting manually. They had been pitched ETL by some consulting companies but shied away after hearing the costs. They had two people, including the DBA, do reporting EOM. Two days before the monthly reporting day, those two employees would camp at the office, food and travel paid for, because they would run queries and copy them into excel. 10 hours a day. An off the shelf python ETL tool later, they had automated reporting. Affected the bottomline directly

3. eDiscovery: Lawyers seem to hate computers except to send emails to decide on a phone call. If I were to guess where to find a group of people in room with very high IQ but a contempt for Turing machines, it would be the court room (or the law office). During trial prep, they have these metadata ("load") files that need to be loaded into case review tools. These metadata files come to the plaintiff from the defense side. Long story short, these metadata files have a host of issues. The industry currently does checking (if at all) manually (there are a few new computer savvy LSPs, eg: Everlaw), but I am yet to see validation, data correlation and smart gap analysis (to locate intentionally suppressed data) tools being offered. This is because in most cases, the layers like to do this themselves. Manually. I wrote custom modules to do these that boosted the quality of review, caught these issues and helped the plaintiff's counsel raise concerns to the judge and increase the overall efficacy of the whole process. Affected the bottomline directly

Our programs provide significant leverage to businesses that benefit from it. The benefits are ongoing and outstrip anything that a non-programmer can do in the same amount of time.

Programs can work 24x7 and can scale horizontally, vertically or both. They can outlive the lifetime of the people who wrote them.

I have a client from 2003 who still runs my programs in a VirtualBox hosted Win98 environment because it does exactly what he needs and he was one of my first clients. That whole experience drilled into me the nearsightedness of billing by the hour.

So, can someone explain to me, why, we continue to be happy to be paid $50k for 200 hours@$250/hr before taxes when the program we write can bring in $50k of profit per month, every month, for the life of the business?

I feel very sad, than even after providing so much of value, we feel honored and privileged to get 2 hours/day off (in some situations for a reduced salary!) as if we are cutting trees and our employer makes money only as long as we are actively cutting said trees.

Sincerely hoping people take this long comment, not as a rant, but as a point of discussion. I am writing this during my lunch break and don't have enough time to make this shorter.