I'm all for work-life balance and working on passion projects on the side.
But do that many people really think of their developer job as a salary and a daily grind?
Most developer jobs are for CRUD apps, and you'll rarely be doing greenfield development. There's not a whole lot of room for passion there. If you just treat it as a job, though, rather than something you have to force yourself to be passionate about, it doesn't need to be that interesting. Once you make a living, you can satisfy your creative urges elsewhere.
I think those people live the work life equivalent of hitting all green lights.
Maybe because I remember all to well what jobs I used to have:
- farm hand (heavy work on smaller less automated farms)
- construction (noisy, wet, dusty etc)
- security
- help desk
Being paid 8 hours a day to work on borderline interesting tasks, getting free lunch, being paid to study etc feels great. Oh, and I can work from home if I need to.
I also make my work interesting by putting some effort into it.
Work with great people. Also code reviews make sure new dependencies don't usually in unless the team agrees (we are a reasonable bunch).
Standardized on Angular. It seems to me Angular has less churn. Yes: there is a life cycle and we have to follow the releases but it is mostly well documented.
There is absolutely no reason to be miserable at your day job. You should be preparing for superpowers if not actively using them.
I recommend watching lectures/talks during work, skipping meetings and reading from thought leaders instead of working hard to reach deadlines. Everyone is connected which means you can read and watch what Ian Goodfellow has to say about unsupervised learning or see what the issues with the world computer are from Vitalik himself as easily as listening to your marketing department figure out how to grow 10% in the quarter.