At the risk of sounding out the obvious. PHP is limited to single threaded processes and has garbage collection. It's certainly not the fastest language one could use for handling multiple concurrent jobs.
On the other hand, in 99.99% of web applications you do not need self baked concurrency. Instead use a queue system which handles this. I've used this with 20 million background jobs per day without hassles, it scales very well horizontally und vertically.
May I ask approximately how old you are and what field you're working in? (Or, being passionate in?)
I feel like this is not a realistic view to sustain in most modern tech environments, unless you love inefficiently producing ineffective solutions that just so happens to be profitable, or you job hop every 1 - 2 years.
Interesting, thanks! I feel like that kind of confirms my position: you're not someone who has the same passion for coding, you have a stronger passion for building, leading and selling tech companies, which is why you've done that multiple times.
I've never been a founding engineer, but typically a direct report to founding engineers.
The people I worked with in your position were either like you (e.g. enjoyed programming but clearly got a big rush from the business and money side too) or they were genuinely just pure passionate programmers and miserable, as their role takes them away from that.
There's a whole categories of skills, abilities and problems that are never confronted if a person changes job every <2 years.
Hot take: what if the rise in enshittification and crap tech is because good tech can only be produced with the hindsight of a stable tech career from a stable tech employer?
That's a different topic though. This was about passion in coding for living.
I don't think it's the employee's responsibility to stay in one company if the stability and in-house career path options are questionable, as usually is the case.
If your job is your passion, and your downstream customers give you freedom to treat it as such, it can be fun.
The fun gets sucked right out of it when you have people breathing down your neck waiting for your output, are very particular about what they expect from it in a way that doesn't align with your creative values, etc.
Not all of us have a Lord Saatchi willing to bankroll whatever our brains fart out and call the result brilliant (likely to pump up its value to buyers). Matter of fact, that may just be what ZIRP-era VC can be conceptualized as: business model "Uber for Lord Saatchi-style patronage in tech".
Did you try it with mobile or desktop? It is primarily intended to be played with mouse. I might try to make it easier to play on mobile at some point.
It took our team 5 man-years (1 year of time) to upgrade from Laravel 4 to 5...