6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech

6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their priorities are more important than your own. The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations just get higher and more grind. I can second this. I have been working in the industry for 10 years and I figured that while I work for (probably big) companies and code someone else's ideas I'm stuck. Not to mention that the bigger the company the more enterprisy the software. That's why I started to do my own development on my own ideas at home. Ever since I started to do so I'm feeling much better. I regularly contribute to GitHub projects as well. I also feel rejuvenated by being LEAN and using the fewest possible 3rd party libraries. Now I know the code I'm using since I can see the source of all libraries I use and they are much simpler than the enterprise stuff. I'm sure that after a number of successful side projects I will be able to work on my stuff full time. This is my primary focus at the moment and the thought of achieving this makes me more happier now reaching a 7/10.