“we've been sold a dream here and that's the dream that our value as developers is tightly bound to the scale of the economic output of our code the bigger the better the better the code the more important we are as developers and anything that doesn't aspire to be that next big thing is quickly called a pet rock project”

Unlearn the lie that developer worth scales with code's economic output

Tech career culture conditions developers to equate self-worth with the economic scale of the code they ship — FAANG, unicorns, billion-dollar exits. That belief makes "$3K/month indie tool" feel like failure even when the tool is genuinely useful and funds your life. Catch yourself when you measure your work that way. The unlearning takes years and is exactly what frees you to ship the small, profitable, niche thing that the system told you not to want.