Food for thought: if you approached getting paid more like it was a fun new optimization problem to be studied, deconstructed, and hacked, you would already be getting paid more. Instead, you're busy making other people rich.

Apologies if I sound like a broken record on this topic. It is largely projection.

Hey, you are my inspiration! You actually inspired me to make my own products.

The problem is, matching the day job pay is pretty hard because it's pretty high (should get paid more even though I'm paid well.) I think I'll get there eventually, just need to keep plugging away at it.

I have to say that that sounds awesome. I'll happily trade you my job (no serious academic thinking required) and work for 20% less of whatever they're paying you.

It is awesome.

Here's the problem: I do it all the time and I'm good at it. So people have an expectation of me that I do the hard stuff well. Sometimes, that's not true or a problem is exceptionally hard and those times it's really stressful. It's doubly so when even the experts argue amongst themselves regarding solutions. It's been like that recently so as a result, sometimes I wish I was just doing some CRUD with Django :)

Or we could call you lucky for getting paid to work on stuff that's cutting edge instead of boring CRUD apps.

Seriously, I'm curious where you work.

Yeah, I'm definitely lucky but man, sometimes it's stressful. Especially recently, I've had some really difficult problems to get through.

I kind of work for myself though it's more accurate to say that I work for a lot of people in various highly technical and often mathematically intensive industries...