[jonstaab]

Sounds like you might want to move on. I've been at kinda crappy startups for 4 years now, not being paid much and working hard. But like, Idaho hard. 55ish max hours a week. And I've stuck to it because I have so much agency. I live a very modest life, but work flexible hours from home, self-direct my work, make my own decisions. There are things I miss (e.g. working with other engineers), but the work is valuable, meaningful, and mine. I like it and from what people are saying in this thread I seem to have it made.

I understand it's not always simple to make the change (which is why I've kept my standard of living relatively low on purpose). But it can be done, there are places way out in the sticks that need good talent, and even if you're not architecting realtime distributed systems there can be interesting projects on tiny teams.