Great story!

> You’ll soon find that doing your hobby for a living cools your enthusiasm for your hobby

I think a lot of software developers are in that situations. I suspect for a lot of us, programming started as a hobby.

> A non-obvious negative is getting used to loss of status

I can imagine. I never had a great status, it can sound very vain but I sometimes I wish I had one :) Ironically, working in a big tech company can send you to the very top of the salary range but nobody knows, you're just a "programmer" which isn't super prestigious.