(b). This might not be directly comparable to the corporate/startup situation, but I'm currently ditching courses that I'll need to graduate to work on that awesome project in an international research team that involves this cool hot-plug JMX microkernel architecture and is about to change the world, shape the future, save the helpless and whatnot.... so what I want to say is I'm all for the excitement factor. They say that you should look at life like you look at a book. Do not value it by the number of its pages but by its content.