Ask HN: I'm sick and tired of being employed as SWE. What do I do?
I've been in tech for over a decade now. Worked in all kinds of companies: big, small, startups. Been a software engineer my entire career (or better say: web developer). I'm in my thirties, and I can't live with the realization that I'd have to do it for another 30 years. It makes me wanna disappear. Let me explain.
I'm tired of the meaningless rituals of a the corporate world. I hate working with other developers for various reasons: some have their own motives, some just rewrite stuff over and over. I came to realization that programming is a solo job and teams don't work well for that. And most of all, I hate salaried job. I hate knowing that I'll keep making the same constant pay for the rest of my career while being chained to a 9 to 5. The world has much more to offer than this.
I dread every working day. I do minimum to get by and not sabotage myself. The rest I spend watching YT or whatever. I really want to break into entrepreneurship and work on my own software as I DO LOVE programming. I just hate doing it as employee. I know it sounds like whining, but I really hate being constrained to agreed upon working schedule, while knowing that there is a different way. I don't care working hard or long hours, but I want to do it on my terms and not by being a meaningless cog in a rusty machine.
I try to dedicate most of my free time to work on my things, but some days are though. Some days, my day job kills me mentally that I'm unable to focus and concentrate on my side projects. And sometimes I'm loosing faith. I've been doing to for more than a decade now, both full time job and building side projects, but I never came to actually building something that would allow me to make a living. Maybe I suck at entrepreneurship as well.
Before you award me the depression title, I'm not depressed. I eat well, I socialize, go to the gym, talk to people. I'm in a good shape, and I enjoy life. I'm in a relationship. But I dread the 9-5, and sometimes the rest of the day as well, since 9-5 sucks the life out of me.
And the biggest fear? That I've recently realized that nothing is going to change. And I no longer can live with the though that I have (best case) three more decades like this. It's equivalent of being dead 5 out of the 7 days a week for me. I can't do it anymore.
I think that some people are not built for such environment. And I don't want to judge those who enjoy it, but I don't. I know that I've meant to do something else, and I know that there is a different way to make a living as programmer rather than commuting to a pointless office and spending 8 pointless hours rewriting the same API over and over again, while having meetings about meetings about designs of why this API is bad as if we are doing rocket science rather then fetching a stupid set of rows from the database.
Help me. Please?