1 - Do my own startup, which would involve probably 5 - 7 years of dedication, which has its benefits and downsides;
2 - Join another startup, which would mean giving away my time and energy again for someone else;
3 - Join a cushy corporate job.
I'm trying to understand what the job market looks like. I have to disclaim that I am in Central-Eastern Europe, because of differences in the job market. But I have a lot of close friends (working cushy corporate jobs) in tech and they mostly mock me for the effort I put into work.
My project management friends admit to working maybe 1 - 2 hours per day. My developer friends admit to working perhaps 16 hours per week but mostly sleeping around and not doing all that much. My DevOps friends seem like royalty, they maybe get some 5 hours per week at a monthly salary comparable to the other two roles.
My best friend is a DevOps that spends most of his time up in the mountains, hiking, or if not, cycling and doing arts & crafts and getting close to Sillicon Valley levels of income working from a low income country for literally minutes / week of work most weeks. This is almost a meme amongst us that the guy has worked maybe a month in total for the past couple of years.
For the last ... 10 years, I've been CTO for TechStars companies, I've been founding engineer for YCombinator companies, I've deployed my own products and it feels like working 30 / 24 hours.
I'm curious how much you guys feel like you're working, or how much you're actually working and for what kind of benefits because I just can't justify to myself working like this when so many people feel like they're living on Universal Basic Income getting lost in large corporations.
Build number 1.
Take the money take the 20 hours of real work.
Build yourself a number 1. It doesn't have to be GOOGLE sized. If you can clear 100k a year on that and invest it that's huge. If you can do 200 or 300 that's even bigger. What can you build that you can sell to 1000 people for 10 bucks a month.
My commit graph on GitHub is a reminder that I actually work almost every day and rarely really fully go on vacation. I work at night, on the weekends, when I travel, on the plane... I'm not very good at fully switching off.
On the other hand, I start and end the day when it feels right - roughly 10AM to 3PM - and mold my work around my personal schedule and the weather. My vacation responder has been on for 2.5 months. Nothing is ever urgent, and I'm always free to pursue impulses.
It's very easy to filter out employees who think they get around with working less then 40h by judging their deliverables