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It's worse knowing you are slaving away your life (which can't be replaced) only to make someone else rich and get a sliver of the profits. Oh yeah, if the wind blows the wrong way, the boss may just decide your are fired and all of your hard work is no longer yours.

I quit my job 2 years ago after I saved enough money to live on for a year (which took 4 years). I always hated working for other people. I not only couldn't be honest to questions like "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" (I can't exactly say "working for myself" but it felt like I was in Jail.

I despise having to ask my boss when I can take a day off or go on a vacation. I'm about to launch my next company and I've contemplated working part-time to bring in some extra income for some business expenses.

Whenever I start the interview process, I feel like I'm back in high school again. Mostly because I feel like I should be interviewing other people for my business and not the other way around.

I know this feeling. Its painful knowing that I should be making my own decisions and deciding my own fate, rather than seeing the VP's bringing home the million dollar salaries for the value I am adding to the business. I promised myself I will escape and never look back. Obviously there is no certainty in startups, but from my point of view, that's comforting. Even though there is no certainty, you always know you are in control of your own fate, and that's reassuring at least to me.

I made almost nothing and I was living on my savings for a year. I learned more and felt more alive than when I made $80K/year working for someone. It's never really been about the money for me..it's about the freedom. Money just happens to be required for that freedom.

This. A million times, this.

I promised myself I will escape and never look back. Obviously there is no certainty in startups, but from my point of view, that's comforting. Even though there is no certainty, you always know you are in control of your own fate, and that's reassuring at least to me.

Exactly. I would rather take a chance and fail, doing it on my own terms, than continue to waste my life away doing shit that is highly unlikely to move me significantly closer to living out my dreams. Life is too short, as Kacy said.

Whenever I start the interview process, I feel like I'm back in high school again. Mostly because I feel like I should be interviewing other people for my business and not the other way around.

OMG, I know that feeling all too well. At my last dayjob, I spent 8 hours a day basically asking myself "why am I taking orders from these mindless drones, instead of working on building my company?" Talk about soul-sucking / soul-crushing / whatever.

I'll have to express the opposite sentiment, I am sitting in my cubicle overlooking a river. I've got VS2010 and Eclipse open, and I've got 5 different browsers installed in my machine. I was previously working at a smaller company (closer to a startup), and while I enjoyed it, there was no career growth potential, at all. When I moved to Mega Corp, I found a place that actively encouraged career development. Also, our technical leadership is always evaluating the latest technologies to see which ones make the best fit for our offerings, so while I may no be using the latest JS library on Github, I'm using more than a few of the more accepted ones.

I don't have a window near me, although that may give me a bit more Zen than I Have now. I get loud support people near me instead. We are stuck in the 90's with our technology and are a Microsoft shop. We do have "career growth" opportunities, but they are the standard tuition reimbursement kind (which are fine). There are great corporations to work for (Google, SAS, Facebook), but the majority of them are soul crushing boring with no care or love for the developers.

Saying that, "the majority of them are soul crushing boring with no care or love for the developers" is a pretty strong claim, for which you've provided no evidence. Certainly some corporate jobs are soul crushing, but the "majority"?

The wrong startup, for the wrong person, can be just as soul sucking as a large corporation. There's plenty of startups that I would never want to work for. This suggestion that corporations are inherently bad and startups are inherently good is overly simplified, and very naive. Google, Apple, and Facebook I'm sure all have employees working on their TPS reports as well. In fact, I'm sure they have security guards, lawyers, and janitors many of whom enjoy their jobs, and add value to the world, despite not being software developers.

I guess I just find the attitude that everyone should be a developer working 80 hours a week for a hot web 2.0 startup very troubling. I worry that some of us have some strange delusions of grandeur. Is the CEO of the next Instagram, working 80 hours a week, really living a better life than the guy next door? In the end, if you're living a life you enjoy, what differences does it make where you work?

Almost all the people I know that work for corporations hate their jobs and would call their job's soul crushing. Granted, I would not be able to find empirical evidence for this claim,it is just based on my experience. There are plenty of good corporations like I stated though. I will agree with you that a crappy job is a crappy job no matter where it is, but I would argue and say that there is a higher possibility of getting a good job at a startup because of the very nature of the work. I will also agree that you should do whatever makes you happy, including if that means you don't get rich or you dont even make money doing it.

How old are you?

Beware that this mindset is what some shops prey on. They entice those who have gone from college to corporate and now want an exciting change. Then they work them to death with dreams of stock options and label 80+ hour workweeks as "work hard, play hard". They're unabashed about it--I've even seen "willingness to put in extra hours to get the job done" in their job description!

Just because you dislike your cubical job now doesn't mean you need to go to the opposite extreme, spending extra hours at work just because a ping pong table is there. Don't end up at a place where working overtime is revered among the staff, it's a toxic mindset that really only benefits the bosses up top.

If you want to go somewhere to change the world, just make sure the people who are running it can first effectively manage the small world that are their employees.

If you've never held a corporate job, you are lucky. It sucks your soul and crushes your dream.

There are good corporate jobs and bad ones. When I, for example, worked at IBM, I had a pretty good time and enjoyed the work, the people and the environment tremendously.

Conversely there are small company / startup situations that are totally soul-sucking. Especially when the economy goes into the tank and layoffs start and the managers start acting like fear is their only tool to motivate people. This happened when I worked at Lulu.com, and I never felt a great sense of the relief than the day I resigned and walked out the door.

I mean, don't get me wrong... I loved my colleagues there, so nothing about this is meant as a slag against them... but the job itself, the management and the vibe had reached a point that, when I walked to my car on my last day, by the time I got to my car, I felt like a 10000 lb weight had been lifted off of my shoulders... I could almost swear that the sky was a brighter shade of blue, and that the grass was greener and that the air smelt better, on the way out than on the way in. Sometimes all the nerf gun fights, and free soda, and $whatever, just can't make up for the other stuff.

If there's a point to all this, it's that whether a job is good or bad does not come down to whether or not you're working for a large corporation or a startup. There are a LOT more variables in the equation than that.

That said, if your job is sucking your soul and you feel the drive to quit (or get fired) and go found a startup, I absolutely advocate doing so!

your post describes so well how I was feeling about a year ago before I switched jobs, and I regret so much that I just didn't leave sooner even if it meant being unemployed for a few months, because life doesn't come back and I didn't really need the money. That was my case, not saying you should do this or that, I'm just saying to never leave happiness for tomorrow, that only worked for Cinderella.

Who says I'm not Cinderella. I agree with you, I have a plan that will get me out of here as soon as possible. I am working on a product that I will launch (with or without Ycombinator's help) by the end of Summer (sooner if I can wrangle it) and that will be my out. I still need the money however (material things owning me and all that jazz), but the moment money isn't going to hold me back I'm out.