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there aren't too many things that i'm a raving aboslutist about, but the freedom of political speech is one of them.
If my employer attempts to step on my neck for saying things about china that china doesn't like, on my time, and my personal accounts, their next contact from me will be from an ACLU lawyer.
That wholly depends on your definition of interesting.
I don't have a PhD.
I've written software that taught literacy to kids, helped people pay their bills online (back in 1999, when this was novel), written full ML systems (15 years ago, before the advent of open source ml packages), co-founded a YC company, and now I'm helping people rediscover the images of their lives (see my profile if you're interested!)
To be sure, I'd love to go back to school. There's so much I know I don't know, and would be wonderful to discover.
Just realize you can work on interesting stuff if you look for it, are willing to stretch your skills continuously, and change jobs every handful of years.
A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.
This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.
A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.
Why is that particular act singled out? Humans need to do lots of things both to ensure individual survival and the survival of the species. Why is "the human reproductive act" morally different from, say, paying someone money to cook food for you? Why is genuinely immoral work (such as advertising) given a free pass?
Which is one of the things that makes democracy and civil rights great: different people can express different perspectives and influence the decisions made.
Chirac was a crook. I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm surely glad he left.
"may the one who never sinned throw a rock at me"
Imagine the following scenario.
Acme Co. has some piece of software that is critical to the operation for their business.
Dave is in charge of the software system. The software crashes often but Dave is always there to save the day.
Dave often has to stay up all night and is seen fixing problems at the final hour. Management takes notice of this and often sends out emails congratulating Dave for his hard work.
One day Dave leaves, and is replaced by Amy. Amy takes over the system and slowly and methodically fixes all the bugs that were causing the outages in the software.¹
Over time the code becomes more reliable, till eventually it runs smoothly.
Now what would management say if you asked which programmer was better. They'd likely say: "Amy is pretty good, but boy that guy Dave was a real rockstar!"
When you reward a behaviour, you will get more of it.
If you want software maintenance, then you need to reward it. But often, perversely we reward its opposite.
I'm working mostly as an ops person these days, and if I do my job well it makes my contribution look invisible. When things are going right, there won't be anything to notice.
1: In other words, code maintenance.