[ornornor]

This advice often comes up, and I’m sorta in the same boat as OP (the difference being that I’ve written software for the last ten years but never stayed longer than 18 months at a place for similar feelings OP has)

I’ve often considered entrepreneurship but always felt this wasn’t right either. Making any amount of money (let alone enough to replace your day job) is a multi year adventure of very long hours. And even then it has a very high chance of failing. So it’s a huge investment for several years with very little chance of any payoff. You’re almost always better off working for someone else money wise and across the board (unless you’re both skilled and lucky, which means well above average, which by definition excludes at least half of people)

What I’m doing now is working at an easy but mind numbingly boring job where the software quality is abysmal. It’s a tough change because I was used to startups with decent standards (unit testing, code reviews…) but it freed me to let go. I don’t care at all about the product. I don’t care if it succeeds or not (it never should but because our customers are captive vis regulations they have to keep buying from us)

I negotiated to be paid well enough (mostly based on my previous experience at better companies and the knowledge I got from it) which helps some. And I put in my 40h (I always refuse overtime), take the paycheck, save 70% of it. Working from home has been awesome because I can limit work to a few hours a day before I go mad and still not lose the rest of the time I’d normally be stuck at the office without much to do (poor planning on my betters’ part). This lets me see the end of the tunnel ins few years where I’ll be able to quit working if I want to (and I’m pretty sure I’ll want to), 30–40 years earlier than most.

All this to say that if you can write software but don’t feel like starting your own company then this could be a valid option too. And you don’t even have to play the corporate game because you’re only in it for 10 years so don’t really care about promotions etc. Where I work managers are paid 20% more (before tax!) than individual contributors but they get 10x the headaches and longer hours. No thanks.