[_ink_]

This hits home. I was in a startup together with very smart people, way smarter than me. We tried to pull off the impossible and were succeeding quite well in that. Unfortunately nobody pays you for solving problems that no customer has. So the company ran out of money.

Now I am in a big global company and my life sucks in a way it never has sucked before. I do not know how I will proceed from here, maybe I should leave software development completly and try something else.

But if you haven't done it, try working at a startup. May days there were nearly 100% coding. No pointless meetings, no useless managers, no corporate bullshit. Come in in the morning, fire up the IDE and do the things that need to be done. Fun three years.

[novalis78]

That’s why I do like TheFoundation.com - their advertisement is a bit cheesy but the core idea: to go out and find real world pain points for existing businesses and then to figure out a software solution for them and even get paid customers with a solution in mind has something exhilarating about it. Automation, saved time, progress. Eventually your domain knowledge becomes so huge that you see opportunities to enable a paradigm shift in an industry and larger amounts of capital become available.