That's something bigger. And if having to (e.g.) constantly code HTML in IE6 interferes with that goal... you need to stop constantly coding HTML in IE6.

The underlying fallacy of the original essay is that the life of a programmer consists of a semi-infinite series of programming tasks that only stop when you die. Well, yeah, if you think like an assembly-line worker this is true, but you need not do so. In real-world projects, you do have to deal with HTML, but you don't have to do so to an infinite extent. You only have to write enough HTML to make all the web pages you need to fuel the rest of your comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life. (For some, this is "near zero": PG wrote all the HTML for this site five years ago, probably in less than two hours, and it's working out just fine.)

HN has been over this many times. If you don't enjoy ritual grunt work, get out of the piecework business and solve a problem. [1] Nobody really knows how much work, say, the folks behind the scenes at 37signals do. We don't pay them by the hour, or by the line of code. We pay them for their product. If they can produce the product in half the time, they get the other half of the time to invest in other things. They don't have to spend that extra time programming in systems they hate.

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[1] This ties into my Programmer Aging Hypothesis: Old "programmers" are hard to find not because their brains wither and die, or whatever, but because most of them have learned enough to brand their work as something other than "programming".

I was a "pure programmer", programming for the sake of programming for a long time. Then I started pushing my boundaries by learning new languages for every new project, not necessarily because it was best suited but because pure programming can become dull if there isn't a real impact behind it. Now, I've moved positions and am programming in one of the first languages I learned (PHP) and although I feel the limitations of the language, the project is something I believe has potential to impact a lot of people in a beneficial way and am sold out behind the idea. It is my "something bigger." And, unfortunately, I don't necessarily have the "nice, comfortable" part of life down.

Nobody is ever satisfied with being "satisfied." That's why "satisfied" people complain about all the minor annoyances they bear, such as the whole point of the original article.

If you think hard about it, you'll realize that you'd rather be engaged than "satisfied."