Jobs and interviews suck way too much, quit and work independently?

Same here. Here's what I did. Long story short: I've been a developer at smaller companies, bigger companies, a team lead, and none of these made me happy. With some money saved, i quit for working on a personal project.

8 Months later, I now run 2 online projects: www.rechargeit.com and www.DNhub.com

As you can see, one is publishing, one is domain investing. I love what I do, there are so many to learn and do, I burn money every day with a team of part-time freelancers, and I am trying to find my business way before money gets burned.

Lessons learned? A lot :) Easy path? Not at all Deserve trying? Yes, no doubts

Welcome to my life. Where you're at right now is where I was not a while ago. So it's too early for me to tell you it's awesome just quit and go on your own... Though, I've worked as a SWE for 10 years going from junior all the the way up to staff level. At the end I was working for one of the best companies out there doing %80 bug fixing versus %20 feature work. %100 Micro-managed and absolutely zero motivation/innovation/future/control/independence.

I quit and started making Apps. Again, it's too early to say that it was the best decision of my life. But here is my only advice for people like you:

You're a SWE, the world needs SWE/developers/coder depends how you call it. There are not enough SWE in this world at the moment. So, you're set... This is something you've acquired already, why do you want to spend the next 10 years doing the same thing and not learning anything else? Now, look at Berkley university for example. They received $250 million in fundings from the silicon valley in order to help students starting businesses. That's where we're going. More Startups, new ventures, more entrepreneurs etc. This is the next SWE job that is coming faster than you think. Go out there and go learn how to be an entrepreneur and do it NOW. If you stay stuck in the corporate world you'll be downgraded to a worker working in a factory in a few years from now. Maybe software will be the Nike and you'll be that 14 years old kid coding in Asia for $1/day (sounded horrible sorry but that's my vision). These kids will write code for us. You'll be more than obsolete. If not, machines will do it for us. So, learning new skills and more specifically entrepreneur skills is crucial. I'd encourage every SWE to jump into the other side before it's too late. We're smarter than anyone else. Companies like Apple, Google, FB, Microsoft were built by people like you and I. Not by some BS product managers hiding in the middle of an organization who has no idea where the money is going...

That's what I told myself before I quit. Of course, like you, I have savings and can survive while learning all these awesome things thanks to 10 years of slavery in the corporate world. Good luck and sorry for my crude language.

You've definitely added an angle that I've not thought about. So true. Quit motivation keeps growing! Thanks

Do you work on any side projects you might want to turn into paid products? Can you be the tech guy and the sales guy?

I have a similar problem, I get bored pretty quick.

From my experience, there are a corporate issues. Corporate need to solve them in an effort to survive and earn money for next business. This issues are not "real problem solving" in terms of save world or make world better place. So there are a lot of corporate jobs where your are solving corporate day-to-day issues. After some time it starts to be boring.

I also faced to interview processes where have been asked for insane technical details and implementation but after hiring I found out that I will struggle with past. I need to revise data within CMDB messed up during previous migration. Or other interesting task : perform tedious implementation/tests over entire infrastructure because there is process and it needs to be done only and only this way.

For me it seems like, there are pros and cons for every position...you can have job security but it is exchanged for boring staff. Real problems solving position is facing to higher risk, stress and pressure.

I feel...that I am still searching "my place", trying to do lot of side projects, raised own business...just find what will fulfill me. But day-time is very limited so it is long-term run. I am changing full-time job every 2-2,5 year, often with changing location and it is quite depressed (for me and also for my childrens). I don't feel "home" anywhere. I bought house but i don't know where I will be 2 years from now. Everything due to jobs.

What would your ideal interview process be like? I often hear about horrible interview processes on HN, but it would be interesting to hear how it can be improved.

1-2 hour interview, if you can't know the person in that time then you suck at interviewing. During that you can ask some conceptual problem solving questions, resume questions. Please trust the resume, if you find someone lying you can fire them. Another is just give them 1 day to solve what you want them to do in real life. Some of the companies already do this.