The first time you realize you hate your job is always the hardest.

I try to warn people in advance. Especially when they say they're learning Java. They don't understand the hell that they're working to get themselves into. That's actually a misconception. How long it takes to learn something is up to you. You don't need a degree in any field to get a job in it. Many successful people with a college degree didn't enter the fields their degree was in (Mark Zuckerberg and steve jobs are 2 examples). You'd think "Oh, but he's Mark Zuckerberg. He's an exception." - No, at the time he was just a kid with ideas who's name or family didn't give him a free pass to anything. You just do what you want to do, be great at it, and wake up being rich and famous one day.

Point being, you need to stop looking for things in the whole learn > certificate/degree > get hired mindset. Take some time to find yourself. Who are you? What defines you? What things do you admire about the world? What things do you wish you knew how to do when you see other people doing it? Maybe your future is becoming a magician or a singer. Possibly even a police officer of the stripper variety. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Whatever it is, find it. No one can find it for you.

I worked in software development professionally for about 15 months.

Programming is fun. Programming is great, and lets you do things and express ideas in a way that gets work done, a series of problem solving. Unfortunately having to conform to practices, limitations, requirements, and being put in projects that don't suit you, and forced to work with languages, frameworks, systems that you hate, and then after you put work into it they shut it down a week later because it isn't very effective, or they won't take your input and tell you how they want it to work and then complain it's slow because it has to make 42 calls to the database before it can generate a single page.

In the right circumstances. Programming is a great hobby. Professionally however, I agree it can be soulless, especially when you aren't given the time and resources to fully learn and get yourself situated into a language or framework, or an area that your skills don't cover and you're forced to work at a snail's pace.

Geez atleast you had an idea for a career path early in life. Im 30 and still don't know what to do with my life so I push a broom in one job and bag stuff in the next job.... Take some time off and figure it out and if you can, go travel.

Link of the Day-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqafnxiBAU0

What's stopping you from finding out what you want to do? :o

I want you to sing this to me, Pimp Kitty.

Do realize most people hate their jobs and it sounds to me like the place you work right now isn't so bad.
I advise against giving up your current job for a faint hope somewhere else it will be better because it probably isn't and your situation will deteriorate and eventually your wife will leave you and you'll end up miserable and lonely.
Just stick around there and keep your antenneas in the open, an opportunity will eventually come along or perhaps you will develop a clear path with what you want to do.

There is one thing that strikes me in your post overall : you never consider manual/labour work as an option.

Why is that so? Ther is a wide array of possibilities between farmer, bricklayer, electrician, plumber and more advanced stuff like installing an electronic security system. Each jobs requires different skillsets and leads to different lifestyles far from office work. I've done various and unrelated jobs in my life and if there is one thing for sure it's to forget stereotypes as you could be surprised at how much you happen to like or dislike a particular job (depending on many factors).

Night manager at the local Taco Bell doesn't count.

But I totally buy the cabin and donkey bit. Some people just have to work really hard at finding happiness. I'm glad you found yours. A crazy man living in the woods, surrounded by lots of ASS.

I'm the same. Authority is not nice regardless of the kind or source. I'm not sure I would let myself die but the idea of commit voluntary, non-emotional suicide is very appealing. Let's say you are 80, receive the news you've the nasty kind of cancer with no hope (less than 1% survival rate). I would travel to a new place I've never visited, keep the timeframe in mind then find a quite but nice place, like a large mountain and jump off it. Far better than the expected old age death of modern society lying in some random, depressing home like a vegetable until a vital organ fails. I read in the Economist recently though that overall, global attitude towards euthanasia when you have suffering diseases is growing in positivity so at least there's that.

Out of curiousity, have you done some kind of approximation of minimum investment you would need? I'm thinking of getting together a few ideas myself then pitch them to my great-aunt as she's loaded but she alos has a miserly personality, she enjoys avoiding having to use money far more than using it.

800$ for starters!!!

Oh no you misread my post! I'm not happy because of all that.

At the same time I found all of that I also found this place, and that's why I'm happy. :D

Now where the fuck is my free game and my GOG t-shirt!?

Stay clear of journalism. Take it from someone who tried to go down that path.

I decided to start fresh and follow one of my passions, journalism. The year before I started my degree (because nowadays you need a bloody degree for everything) I managed to get a foot in at a small, local paper that was willing to let me write whatever story I came across.

I continued writing for the paper while studying, hoping that when I finished my degree I would have a really nice portfolio. I did as it opened doors at other publications.

Now here's a little secret few journalists are willing to admit and talk about. The first years you should not expect to get paid for your words. You're lucky if you get a byline, as it looks pretty nice in your portfolio. I was a published journalist with a byline for 5 years, didn't receive one single payment, even when I wrote exclusive stories.

Cutting it short, when I finished my degree I thought I was set. Applied for several jobs as a journalist for half a year. Now I'm back in IT again. As I jokingly tell people, work within IT is not always great, but hey, at least they are more than happy to pay you.

It's also worth noting that journalism has been in a bit of a crisis since 2010-2012. Watch the TV-series The Newsroom. Especially the final season shows exactly why journalism is struggling.

On the brighter side, I have an income now, and you have one less option to consider.

Web programming (aka "being a code monkey") is far FAR afield from the interesting issues in CompSci. I can say this with first-hand experience having done programming for 21 years before finally moving on. The only interesting coding I did was games. There, CompSci gritty technical details and knowledge matters and it's incredibly nuanced and deep. Native programming (programming that produces an executable that runs independently from a browser) to a large extent also did.

Web programming though? Pays extraordinarily well. But, good god is it just awful work. So much so that I took a massive pay cut just to extricate it from my life. This took a while.

My suggestion is, if money is no concern, do what you actually like, or at least what doesn't pain you. Life's too short. This is a rare position to be able to be in, but if you can do it, your life and mental health will be better for it. Barring that, having an escape plan is the next best option. Set a goal and a limit to when you're done and then move on, gradually phasing it out of your life (or cold turkey of you prefer).

At some point you realize, money's nice, all things considered, but not being miserable is important.