I often wish I could live life over and over, trying on different lifestyles just for fun. I’m sure other people think the same way; why else would humanity have invented fiction, memoirs, and (especially) videogames?

The Web makes it even easier to vicariously experience a slice of someone else’s life. For example, the Wall Street Programmer has a great site where he talks all about his (ahem) exciting career writing code for traders on Wall Street. Jobs like his appear to be very well paid, at around $200K per year, but they also involve long hours, frustration, and heavy-duty stress. At his most recent job, it got so bad that he even thought about quitting the Wall Street programming game altogether. Why didn’t he?

I work here because I’m good at what I do. That’s all. After a certain age, you come to realize that you’ve built you entire character around a skill set which is very tightly bound to a particular area. Although you might be jaded, burned out and pissy, you are also ‘the man’. You are respected, even if despised for your personality, and, in a certain sense, looked up to. This is a perk. Granted, it’s a perk created by you through years of crap you wished you didn’t have to do in the first place, but it is a perk.

I’m not quite there yet, but I have begun to notice that certain parts of my skill set keep reasserting themselves when I least expect it. My favorite example is the time I left my job at a failing Web startup, swearing that I would get as far away from database-backed Web applications as I could. I got a job as a semiconductor product engineer, and within three months I was… developing a database-backed Web application, to manage vast piles of disorganized engineering data. Now I find myself studying Ruby on Rails in my spare time, just to tickle that part of my brain that remembers SQL and likes to tinker with Web applications.