Actually the Red Queen theory applied to programmers, though I suspect it's not the only domain where it fits. The Red Queen's race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass" and involves the Red Queen and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot. "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
And the corollary for programmers: "It takes all the programming you can do just to stay employed. If you want to advance in your career, you must program at least twice as much as that!"
It's not how much you program, but how you present your programming. Typical enthusiast introverts are thus at disadvantage, and should find find different avenues. Preferably becoming owners, and keep the benefits of programming to themselves. It's not that anything typical corporations do are that interesting or challenging anyways, except their backwards ways and divisive office politics.
Well, yeah. And programming interviews always test that you don't even do all the programming you can do, let alone twice of that!
To really stand out you have to do both, work smarter and harder. The best predictors of career success in most fields are High Intelligence and High Work ethic.
I've seen a lot of places quote the "run in order to stay" allegory from Lewis Carroll's text, but fewer seem to have caught the Catch-22 in Red Queen's statement. For that matter, it looks like the situation wasn't invented by Joseph Heller, he only coined the term. It takes *all* the running you can do, to keep in the same place. By definition, the best you can achieve is staying in the same place by running the fastest. If you wanna advance, you need to run faster than fastest, which is a nonsense.
I couldn't agree more. If you are a solid developer and don't like working in the bureaucracy of a big corporation then stop complaining and start your own company already! No matter what happens you'll benefit. Either the company will succeed and you'll be far happier than you are working for the machine. Or the company will fail and you'll realize that the world isn't as simple as you thought and perhaps appreciate some of the decisions that you railed under before. So far I've been going with option 1 and couldn't be happier, but I'm not so sure I wouldn't have still been better off if I'd gone with option 2 and ended up back where I started. Better to have loved and lost and all that...
Perhaps you missed the $50k thread I posted not long ago. I'm right in the process of starting my own, never said the world is simple.
Was that the $50K mm thread? Good luck in any event. Feel free to pm me if you have questions or need anything. I'm on my second startup and mostly loving every minute of it, and love seeing others make the leap.