[illumin8]

I changed jobs regularly about every 18 months for the first 10 years of my career, for mainly the same reasons as you do. What I found was that I would start a new job with a lot of hopeful optimism, immediately making huge amounts of progress, impressing my co-workers and managers with my hard work and new and improved approaches to problem solving. After 90% of the low hanging fruit improvements had been implemented, the last 10% would be hung up by red tape, unflexible co-workers, bad management, and the general suckitude that almost every company has.

I would get frustrated and start looking for greener pastures. After doing this for the first several years, I realized this approach was better as a contractor than a full time employee. I did contracting for several more years, until I found a company that just "sucked less" than the others I'd worked for.

One thing you will learn as you have more experience: All companies suck to work for (unless you started it yourself). Some just suck less than others. Try to find one that you can at least tolerate the suckage. When I get bummed out about idiotic co-workers, management that doesn't know what the hell they're doing (example: no backup generators for a data center with $millions in equipment), I just close my eyes and try to meditate on the six figure salary and five figure annual bonus. That usually makes me forget how much it might suck at the time. Oh, and the fact that I still get to play architect and design some cool systems.

Good luck!

[abyssknight]

Thanks for the great advice. I've been considering breaking out and doing my own contracting, and have done it before, but I'm in need of stability. Hopefully I'll find that place that just 'sucks less' soon; it just hurts to be in what others would consider 'the perfect job' and feel so empty. Good to hear I'm not the only one that struggles with this.