So when I get home at night, I stay up and work on my own little projects here and there, just so I can remember that programming is a bunch of fun.
Anyone else doing/have done that?
-mohsen
The difficulty with this state of affairs is that the work you do at your job begins to become a [time+motivation+energy] sink, and you often find yourself wishing that you could devote more of yourself to your pet projects.
This in turn affects your performance at work, giving you a perpetually negative loop that's broken when you shift jobs.
There are very few excuses, I think, to not find good work these days. Pay with personal circumstances is the only I can think of - if you have a family with enough children to make accepting lower pay for better an impossible decision, for example.
I beleive that you have just this life to live. Make the most of it.
Not all areas are flooded with good jobs, and mine isn't one of them. I've interviewed with a few companies that didn't hire me, and the process of interviewing takes such a toll - mostly emotionally, but also several hour+ long phone calls, and a whole day off to interview, a few nights spent on code samples... I'm reluctant to do it again. Especially when my job is "not that bad" and it's hard to get a clear signal on just how great any other potential job might be.
Also, pursuing my side projects is something I want to continue.
I work for a large game developer by day, and by night I go home and write my own open-source game engine, as it lets me learn what I need to learn. It's very hard to experiment with new techniques at work, but it's important to my skill development. Also the codebase at work is so horrible, that working with a nice, concise C codebase in the evenings is positively pleasant by comparison.
Soon after that, I solve a little personal problem by coding the solution, or I discover a cool new tool, or I fix a little bug in an application I use, even if it's written in a language I'm not familiar with.
At which point, I remember that I'm never going to quit programming because it's so damn useful. And it can be fun too, if you work on the right things. Even if I go on to be a farmer, I'll still solve the odd problem by programming the solution. And I'll always have an appreciation of simplicity, bestowed upon me through endless nights of working against stupid, complicated technology.
If I had some land and the skills to make it viable to live off of it, then I would. That solves most of my life debt since I'm fairly ascetic.
Mostly kidding, though if anyone is intrigued by such ideas, feel free to contact me.