>I had similar reasons - after five years of teaching maths in a high school, I switched to the keyboard. Not that I went out of my actual profession - I was entitled to both jobs by my degree - but there was a big difference in the outcome. I could do all the possible showbiz at the blackboard, but the results remained the same, and actually unknown. I couldn't know if I'm good or not, because the kids learned almost nothing - it was a school with a lower rating, and all the worst kids were there. I never knew if I actually taught them something, or someone else in my position could do much more. No feedback at all.
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>Now when you write a cool app, you see it work, and you see it work right away. If it doesn't, can't blame anyone else but yourself - and it teaches you a lot about work and results of work. Teaching (at least in a school like that) is just like singing in a hurricane - nobody can hear you, and you can't hear yourself; good or bad doesn't matter.

My experience is similar, I taught 2 years of undergraduate lower-level math for mostly humanities-type majors that did not care for math much at all. And the realization that if I stayed in teaching, I was going to get a lot more of this, before I had enough seniority to get *real* math students who cared about the subject. So the satisfaction level was quite low, as compared to the nice quick results you get with a cool app working, as you describe (aside from the bug reports and enhancement requests, anyway :)