If the government sees it as payment I see it as payment . not that I care because that thing looks amazing <| sep |> I guess what do define an impressive or remarkable careers ? I ' m valued as one of the top performers at the company I currently work for and top people who have been there since the 80 ' s always say they need to hire more SWEs like me . I ' ve been told by people that my name comes up often in meetings with company leaders . My opinion is sought after for company level software SOPs on how we should do things . Standards we should up hold . How we should define software based roles within the company . I tend to be the person always trying to push new tools that make sense for what we do . I personally don ' t think I am anything special though . I have a do it right or don ' t to it at all approach to everything I do . I treat all code I write as if I was doing it for myself . It ' s like if I hired a plumber to fix something in my house and he says if it was my house I would do X , but Y would suffice . Why would I not do X as this supposed professional says that ' s what he would do in his house and he has motivation to do it right for himself . If you ever heard of Mike Holmes and his shows I really take that approach . I hate people who take shortcuts or half ass things . I hold myself to a high bar and through that hold others to the same bar . To not do that makes it seem like I ' m smarter than them which I don ' t think that ' s true at all . In terms of school , I went to my state university which isn ' t anything special . I would guess not even a top 200 CS school . Out of my college friends that were also CS I ' m probably the dumbest as all 3 of them went on to get their Ph . D . One now works for Google and the other Nvidia . I could never get in to those companies as I ' m not naturally a quick thinking person . I need to digest a problem for a few hours and then I ' ll come up with an answer . Personally I like to think I make up for my lack of quick thinking , by working hard and writing solid code . I routinely have the lowest bug rate in my code once it makes it into mainline . Granted I test the shit out of it so any bugs in my code never make it off my desk .