Dear first world dev, I am going to live your nightmare
>  I can do it myself sitting at home, I’ve done a couple projects, but it was not fun.No you can't, obviously. You just said it. For one, you don't enjoy it.What you need to learn is that straight programming isn't a valuable skill by itself. You already know this because you wrote an article about it. You need to be able to tie your programming skills with other skills such as selling yourself as the person to get the job done. Once you get the job, you need to be able to ship it.There are programming skills that are valuable in isolation. If you are a world expert on a certain domain which lacks talent, then that's valuable. But that's not really isolation, that's tying your programming skills with a certain specialty.Take a look at the model you are working under. There is a whole spectrum of jobs from good to crap. On Odesk, there are a sprinkling of good and a lot of crap. I imagine the company employing you is saying yes to every job that comes their way. They probably don't get good jobs, so it's all crap. They get crap jobs which pay crap and of course you are going to get a small slice of a crap pie.Why take a job just because it's there? Okay, you laid out a bunch of reasons but you still hate it. I would probably hate working on crap jobs also. People worked for Steve Jobs because the guy was... well... Steve Jobs. Why are you working for people who are trying to compete on the worst model in web development, the race to the bottom in pricing?If you know good developers, then maybe you could start your own development shop and get those developers to work for you. If you hate the work but you can get jobs, then maybe do the selling and have the other developers do the work.Or maybe you could come up with your own projects and monetize them.You just have to hustle, just like everyone else does. You can't just write code and expect the world to come to you. Get out there and make things happen.Edit: In other words, quit whining. ;)Edit: Edit: I could write a book on this subject. The above is just an attempt at an off the cuff capture. There are a ton of threads on HN which are hugely valuable on bringing the bacon as a developer. Just look around, it's more productive than ranting about your situation.Clearly the person you are working for is trying to take a "this is how everything is done here" approach to running a dev shop and hiring developers. It's the same in the Philippines. Everyone works 10 hour days, 6 days a week and within a certain band of salary. I suppose the U.S. is like that to some degree. We have the 9 to 5 and 40 hour weeks.Disruption in your case would be pretty easy. If the company has decent employees, then you could scoop them all up.