Comment by spin

There are good office jobs and there are bad office jobs. There are good employers and bad employers. The best jobs I've had usually have some basic deadlines (measurable goals and results), and some basic rules (show up every day), but other than that, not much structure or micro-management or anything. If you're a full-time programmer on a team, then you might have a lot of little tasks assigned to you (eg: "add feature X to user profile page", "fix bug Y on the logout screen", etc.), but not constant surveillance or anything. If you're constantly checking in code to Github, then your boss knows that you're working.