Ask HN: Techniques for surviving a job you loathe?

I was involved in a startup for a year that ended early last year because the person funding it got cold feet - it was his idea. As a result, I basically took the first job I could find, which is in the finance industry. My roles to date have largely been around management of people and architecture.

My home town is literally at the bottom end of Australia. Beautiful place but there are very few development jobs and no paying startups here.

I have a child with another on the way. My partners salary is insufficient for us to live on.

My job is a dev at a medium size company (around 300). The development in this company is appalling, non scoring on the Joel test and the work is boring. There is no challenge, people play games on their phone and sleep all day. The managers are micromanagers and the developers sit at the bottom of the org chart (this is a software company).

I'm building a cool product out of work, but I'm at it alone and I fear that someone will beat me to market (trying for bare minimum viable product). I also fear burn out (has happened before), the company attempting to invoke its IP clause of contract when they find out (legal advice has been that they have no ground).

I'm working 8h a day in my day job and 5-6h a night on the startup. I take weekends off to spend time with the family.

I have a deep understanding and portfolio of experience across mainframe development, enterprise Java, .NET, mobile apps & web development. I need something that challenges me - moving is off the cards due to baby #2 & I doubt selling remote work (if I can find a reliable income stream) to my partner.

For those who have been in similar situations: how did you manage and balance everything?

A 13-14 hour work day sounds pretty daunting. Could the pressure you're putting on yourself with the startup be making your day job even more unbearable? Your concerns about being beaten to market are understandable, but remember that there's almost definitely as much (if not more) work to be done when you actually get your product to market. It likely won't be a picnic, so making sure you balance your time between work/pleasure now is important.

And one last thing - if people can get away with sleeping or playing games on their phones all day, it sounds like a pretty 'lax' working environment. It sounds like it has the potential to be whatever you make it.

Sorry if I've stated the obvious & good luck!

If there is a way to change your job -- don't hesitate much and find anything better or similar but closer to your heart. Again perfectly it would be own business but not many people are business type, and stable salary is often preferred -- so pick one which you would like even if it doesn't pay that much, but leaves more free time for hobby or side project.

That is assumed your health and physical conditions are good enough to not cause more problems.

With regards to making work more challenging in the day job, that's the problem. They aren't open to anything. It's all set in stone. Hell, I'm not even allowed to refactor or write unit tests. Unit tests here refer to manual testing checklists.

1. try thinking about your life in 5 yr chunks - a steady paycheck to pay off my mortgage really fast (secure future) and manageable/flexible work hours to maximise time building a foundation for life with my little one before she turns 10 is a wise but dull way to spend a few years. knowing it's worth it, and why, may help with the grind.

2. find a minimum $$ number you can live with and then find the smallest company/association/NFP that will pay this. small companies may not need you to go deep, but they _love_ people that can go wide. make sure flexibility in time/location are agreed up front - see 1. Go wide in the weirdest way you can think of every single time ie, become their economics guru by focusing on the data visualisation first, not the SQL queries. refuse to use a spreadsheet at work. write reports in html and distribute as a package. organise an industry conference and grow it. seriously, you'd be surprised how much lattitude you can get if you actively pick to work for people that _want/need_ initiative.

3. understand stakeholders and how they influence the decisions your boss will make. see 1 and 2. try and frame every proposal as something that is both interesting to you and as something that will make your boss look good. build trust. be aware of being taken advantage of but remember 99% of people are reasonable so don't be too paranoid. creating and launching things is a habit not something you choose to do on a whim.

4. don't sweat the small stuff. it's just $$ - enjoy what you can and treat it as a process. understand where you're going, not where you are.

5. personal sanity - build or invest in something that can't be (easily) hacked by software. this is moat between your future business and the leech competitors. personal relationships are in this category as are delivery chains or quality>quantity. design and distribute a small range of programmable toys - partner with your local high school and build the reputation first etc etc...

6. look behind you occasionally. if you're not careful, you only look at the people ahead of you and how much more successful/rich/pretty/talented they are - considering how much of this is due to dumb luck, this will only make you depressed. stop occasionally and turn around - there are vast numbers of people around the world thinking exactly the same @#$@#$ thing about you.

7. again with the little ones. because it's important and you don't get a do-over. don't let their childhood memories be 'mum/dad was always busy' - when they're 12ish, they will barely want to be in the same room with you anyway ;-)

8. be with your partner - they're with you for a reason, make sure you don't just assume that will always be the case.

hope it works out for you.