My conclusion to the BS inherent to any job is this: get your "brain food" outside your job. Start today if you haven't been doing this. It's fine that sometime

My conclusion to the BS inherent to any job is this: get your "brain food" outside your job. Start today if you haven't been doing this. It's fine that sometimes we get to learn interesting things while on the clock, but we have way, way, way less control over what we learn. I have followed this strategy for some years: 1) Look for a low-stress job with manageable time. In tech this doesn't mean "low-pay" as well. I'm being paid quite well and I will never do more than 40 hours a week. 2) Treat that job as your day job to pay the bills, and learn whatever you want during your (relatively abundant) free time. Learn a new programming language, learn about any other topic of computer science or software engineering, get any skill not related to your job, get a new degree, whatever. It is up to you whether you want to learn something that will make you more money in the future or not. Beware: open source projects are nice but, unless it's a project of yours and yours only, you have less control over what you do, and in that sense it's a bit closer to a job. It's also true that mundane tasks will make you much better at your job, but TBH, while that's helpful (and helps building a career more than most young people would think), it's not something that important to me. I'd rather be good at things that are important to me. A job is there to pay the bills and nothing more; anything else is a bonus which I won't take for granted, and this includes the social aspect of the job.