Honestly I don't know why I didn't do that from the start and worked on my projects in my spare time.
It's been a few months and I do not miss coding full time one bit, hell even no longer being involved deeply in tech is a breath of fresh air.
I've had previous management experience (CTO in small start up, Lead Dev ...) so I managed to leverage that during my interview process, then it was mostly showing I was really interested in growing a product and see it succeed.
Software development, for whatever reason, directly spends "spoons" (in the sense of https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...) at a high rate.
Because of this, it's hard to do much else that requires willpower after putting in a day's work as a programmer. You can do habitual things just fine; or procrastinative things. But, outside of those two activity-classes, it's hard to even do the most enjoyable of things—like, for example, watching a serious, dramatic movie—because you won't get anything out of such activities if you don't invest some emotional energy into them, and you've just plum run out.
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In a more technical sense, it's my understanding that the activity of programming somehow "uses up" a lot of dopamine, and so gradually depletes one's available store of dopamine over the course of the day in much the same way that stress, cold environments, and surprising loud noises are known to.
Thus, a neurotypical person who spends eight hours programming in a day, will end up effectively equivalent in behavior/mentality to a person with ADHD for the rest of the day, until they can sleep it off and recover.
(This means you could probably restore your "spoons" by taking ADHD medication just after leaving work... but that seems ill-advised, for multiple reasons.)
1. IP ownership - many companies include total IP ownership during your time of employment.
2. If it's a soul sucking place, you'll burn out quickly and won't want to touch a computer, even if you love coding.
3. Making some company 10-20x your salary is disheartening.
4. You are at the whim of your bosses.
5. Many companies make getting anything done a huge pain in the ass. Over zealous security policies, over tight virus scanners choking your development box, requiring shitty company hardware to develop on, some DBA rejecting your SQL because he decided everyone should do it this way this week, network guys not fixing a horribly slow network, etc.
There are advantages, of course. The problem is you probably will never be able to get a business up and running while working at another job, it just takes too much attention.
I think it depends upon what you want in life from your current situation. Having worked extensively in both startups and big corps, I've enjoyed working for startups where my work and ideas can make a huge impact on the business, far more than in the corporate world. And both have asked me for extra hours at crunch times, but at a startup they know they are asking a lot, and there's a chance for abstract future rewards as a result. When I've had mandatory unpaid extra hours at a big corp, I got a couple of slices of "free" pizza (and I got to not be fired).
In recent years I've worked for small established businesses/non-profits, and I enjoy the happy medium.
People will find themselves preferring "startup life", going from startup to startup, never staying past acquisition, without really knowing why; and then they'll invent all sorts of clever justifications for that. But really, they just enjoy the fact that their job is a gamble and could disappear at any moment, and will miss that and "feel bored" whenever they don't have it.
Just like some people who are "natural soldiers" find it hard to find jobs they enjoy after coming back from a war (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/68v9dv/photo...), some people who are "natural startup people" find it hard to find jobs they enjoy that aren't in startups. Because the risk/stress isn't there, and that's what they really want out of a job.
Are you proposing that every freelancer / solo-dev is unattractive to potential mates per se?