If you dont mind me asking, what happened ?
Since I was deeply involved in Tibet issue I decided to visit Tibet and spend two months travelling there to see the situation with my own eyes.
By chance I came to a small village called Ashuk in Kham (east Tibet, located in Sichuan province). The first impression was not good - everything was just mud. Mud houses standing next to the muddy road. The only nice place with decent food was the house of a local Rinpoche. One day I was bored and I baked a simple cake. He tried it and said I should stay there.
I ended staying there for three months. Mud was just one face of the place. Sun, green grasslands and incredibly kind people the other one.
In the next village I met a young buddhist master who was working on establishing a home and school for orphans. Helping him gave me a real reason to stay longer. We ended up opening the school in 2006 and it is still going strong [1].
I published a book about it [2] in Slovenia and hopefully I'll manage to do the English translation this or next year.
I think you have achieved a major life goal already that most in Silicon Valley do not. I don't know if HN is the place to praise such deeds, but you did your small part in hacking the world to make it better. Kudos to you, don't ever let it feel as a wasted effort. That's so wrong a way to think.
There are people who want to help others and their repeated attempts fail. You just went and did something that's working for 7 years.
That's a pretty successful startup in my book. It can't go viral for obvious reasons, but it's mature and stable. And you did it without HN :-)
A lot of times it is said that you should pursue your carrier while you're still young and without many responsibilities. But the same goes for creating something meaningful with your life, for exploring the world and widening your perspective on life. It is much easier done when you're young and it beneficially affects the rest of your life.
Kudos
Almost exactly my situation at the moment. Hoping to get to where you are!
Sometimes it is better to just cut your loses and let it go. Then find something better. Nothing is more important than your physical and mental health.
Start with small projects. It is very rewarding to finish something, even more so if you get people to actually use your work.
Also, software engineering is a very multi-faceted profession, that can involve much more besides programming:
- understanding business processes, regulatory needs, economics; - working closely with people as part of collecting user needs, customer support and team work; - education and psychology; - user experience and design; - ...
There is a lot of place and flexibility to find what interests you the most.
After that I switched a couple of regular jobs and enjoyed every single one of them: working on real-world problems (electronic banking, multimedia production) together with bunch of talented and all-around nice people.
My carrier was interrupted by unexpectedly getting stuck in remote mountains of east Tibet for almost two years. After returning home I felt professionally disoriented and took on a couple of terrible freelance gigs, working for a year like crazy and earning about 2 EUR per hour (in EU) because of feature creep on a fixed amount project.
Then I got to my senses and started a consulting firm doing mostly web development. Since childhood I dreamt of having a company of my own. When I got it, it was far from glamorous - trading time for money that barely paid for my rapidly growing expenses (marriage, mortgage, kid).
Software development is one of the rare professions where you can relatively easily create something that has a value on its own - scalable and not directly dependent on how much time you put into it.
Selling products instead of my time was my goal throughout this time. Now, seven years later, we (I run the company with my wife) are finally getting there [1] [2].
I made a lot of mistakes in these 20 years, but in general, if I could go back, I would not do it much differently. Mistakes are an important stepping stones on the path.
So, what I'm trying to say is this: you're young, do the things that excite you. There is nothing wrong in working for and with others. At any time, you can decide to try creating something on your own. At this stage in life you can probably take on more risk than later when/if you get a family. But no point in over-calculating things. As long as you breath and your heart beats you have the freedom to steer your life in any direction you choose.
[1] http://pinegrow.com [2] http://getbooklers.com