Ask HN: Love programming but hate my job at AmaGooFaceSoft, advice?
Being in a mundane job and checking out at 5 has it&#x27;s benefits - you have both the time and the energy to focus on the projects and people you actually care outside of work hours.  You also don&#x27;t have to worry about money.<p>Your instincts may push you into a small startup where your work has immediate impact and feedback, but there&#x27;s a space between 10 employees at 100K employees.  I used to be in consulting (at a software company) and I worked with everybody from small startups that wanted to partner to companies with 200K+ employees.  I tended to enjoy working the most with companies with 1K-10K employees.  Those had interesting problems, interesting people, a sensible pace of work, and a somewhat tolerable amount of processes and bureaucracy.  50K+ employees almost always felt like I was in a satire.  With really large companies (100K+), I came to understand how they could layoff 10% of the employees and still go on like nothing happened.<p>I&#x27;m not telling you to stay at your current job(don&#x27;t stay at a job you hate!), but try to think about what you want your spare time to be like before make a move.  Going to a place with a constant stream of challenging and interesting work might be nice at first, but after a while you might find your energy for side projects is zero.<p>There must be teams at the big 4 where you get the opportunity to do some interesting work and then go home and work on things that you are really passionate about.  JSeymourATL provided a great answer -  Assuming it is possible, network within the company and find a group that is doing something you find interesting.  Unfortunately some companies are too political to be able to do this.  Or you may have a horrible manager who will retaliate if you try to do this.<p>All that being said, some people need to be in charge.  They need to be entrepreneurs.  I know a brilliant engineer who owns a small construction company now because he&#x27;ll do anything to not report to somebody else.  He simply isn&#x27;t built to have a boss and not have control of his work, or be obligated to VCs for a tech startup.