Title: I am a long time HN reader and trust this community. I would love opinions of HN in general.<p>I might be going through midlife crisis. I am feeling a bit lost and a bit failure. I have a soul-sucking but decent job at one of major tech companies. But I never cared for my day job, as I had been focused on my side projects.<p>Now I have a wife and 2 kids. We need a bigger house, but we cannot afford it. We could have bought our dream home in 2020 but prices have skyrocketed in my area. This made me start paying attention to my career. I see my friends who focused on their day jobs are now much higher on corporate ladder.<p>I am at the point where I cannot really work on any side project because of kids. I rather spend my free time with them. A few options I am considering:<p>A. Keep the day job, and aggressively move into management. Safe and I know internal politics. The cons might be too much politics. People skills don&#x27;t expire though.<p>B. Keep the day job, stay an individual contributor. Sharpen my technical skills and become an internal or external thought leader. Again safe. But may not have enough time to really be a thought leader. Harder to be a great IC and make the same amount of money as mediocre leadership.<p>C. Get a new job at FAANG as IC. I could easily make 2x - 3x my salary there. But I am not great at LeetCode. And I don&#x27;t want to take time away from my kids to do LeetCode.<p>D. Get a new job anywhere as an IC. I could probably get 1.2x to 1.6x of my current salary. May not be enough to buy a bigger home. But work-life balance should be better than FAANG and there is no need to waste time on LeetCode.<p>E. Start part-time freelancing and quit my day job. I have a few past clients that should be able to provide enough work. I can pay bills and use extra free time to work on my side-projects. Riskier but might be good to take a break from my day job. Eventually freelancing could turn into a consulting business.<p>I am leaning towards option A or option E. What do you think?
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