I had originally gotten in programming, as you said because of the excitement of hacking, "hello world"; it was an intrinsic joy that I had that I derived although extrinsic rewards (striking it rich) was in the back of my head. But it wasn't the extrinsic demands that was driving me day-to-day, otherwise I would have gone into accounting instead of programming.

But it was all of these extrinsic demands that pushed me to climb the corporate ladder, deal with maintenance & management etc. In so doing, I was telling myself that I had to plough through these minutiae to get to my big external validation of climbing the ladder, becoming rich, etc - when in fact, it was my intrinsic motivation that got me to where I was from the get-go. And if getting to the and staying at the top means sacrificing the internal joy for external validations, then it's not worth it.

I used to think that dropping your obligations to the ladder is counterproductive to your career. But not anymore when I spend more rationalizing and calming myself down from all of the angst of writing TPS reports and posturing/covering my ass during meetings. I don't even have anymore energy/time to actually write code. And that's pretty damn counter-productive.

I always have taken a broad definition of hacking and I see this pattern everywhere. You could see playing guitar as having fun creating music & expressing yourself, or memorizing sets & rehearse & network to get your band signed to a huge label. You could see making friends and picking up women as having fun meeting people & expressing yourself, or memorizing sets & rehearse & network to up your social worth, etc.