

Ask HN: Depressed. Find my dream job, or do a startup? - askyui1

Hi HN, I am a recent college grad who&#x27;s been working as a web developer for about 2 years.<p>For the past two years, I&#x27;ve been working at a deadend job as a frontend developer. The work itself is extremely tedious because all we do is inherit badly written websites and we are forced to add changes to it - That&#x27;s all I do. There is also no prospect for a promotion or anything like that.<p>Why did I stick with this job for 2 years? Because of its excellent benefits. I can work from home nearly any time I want, and I also get 4 weeks of paid vacation (not including holidays).<p>Although the work itself makes me feel depressed and neurotic, I feel like it gives me the time to pursue my real passion - creating my own SaaS company. I was depressed in college and my dream is what got me through.<p>But working with horrendous codebases for so long gave me this hunger for writing clean code. Now I fantasize about working with other smart and PASSIONATE people. I want to be around other programmers that are into programming as much as me.<p>I read engineering blogs from other companies, and can&#x27;t help but feel envious of what they have. But I feel like in order for me to pursue my original goals, I need to have all the free time that I can get.<p>I&#x27;m starting to get really depressed and anxious at my job. I wake up dreading to fix yet another stupid bug.<p>I do get job offers here and there because I contribute to open source and regularly attend meetups. But my coworkers tell me that &quot;a job is a job&quot; and that I will hate it no matter where I go.<p>Is this true? Are all software jobs bad? Should I just stick with my current job with the flexible hours?
======
calcsam
If you're lonely, you should join a startup with lots of other smart &
motivated people. It sounds like your colleagues don't care -- which is
reasonable, because what's in it for them?

Startups are horribly lonely experiences. If you're lucky, you're the only dev
for ~1.5years, and then you get to grow the team.

Happy to chat about this more, email in my profile.

~~~
askyui1
Thank you for the offer. I will follow up soon.

