To make things worse, this wasn’t the first meeting on the topic. I’d already wasted an hour and a half listening to everyone talk about nothing the week before.

The sad thing is I could have predicted the final outcome of the meetings and saved us all some time.  The room was packed, it’s crazy to think how much money was spent on the salaries of all the people in the room for those two meetings.

It seemed that I was the only one who could see how ridiculous the situation was. No one else seemed to mind that we’d wasted all that time discussing something that was a foregone conclusion. I’m sure if I could have sent a bill for my hourly rate to everyone in the meeting it would have been much shorter and probably not happened at all.

Riding the Tidal Wave of Useless Meeting Invites
One of the dangers of working for a corporation is that anyone with access to Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes can try and ensnare you in a useless meeting about nothing with only a click of their mouse.  There typically aren’t “best practices” for a meeting setup, everyone’s always so willing to waste your time with another meeting request.

Of course, you do have the power of the decline button.  To keep yourself sane and productive, your default response to any meeting request should be Decline.  If it really is important they’ll follow up with you personally and you can screen the meeting on your waste of time meter.

We all know that despite sending multiple Decline messages, we’ll still get roped sooner or later into some meetings that just waste hours of our lives.  The best way to break free of these worthless meetings is to just leave the corporation. Take yourself out of that wasteful environment.

This just in, don’t bet your career on it. Most managers have a difficult time keeping up with all of their corporate projects, let alone remembering all the things you contributed over the last year. Sure, you can document them all and give them to your boss but will it really make that much of a difference?

Is there any chance that they’ll actually compensate you appropriately for the massive time and effort you put in this year? This is more what you’re more likely to hear:

Remember that month where you worked nights and weekends to get that project done? How about that project where you missed vacation and worked like a dog to get it finished on schedule? Since you gave up two months of your life we’ll change this number from a 3 to a 3.5.

Fighting for Pennies
In many cases, managers have a pool of money to split across all of their team for annual increases. In order to give you more, they have to give someone else less. So the amount of your reward is not proportionate to how well you did or how hard you worked but rather how much was allocated to your group for salary increases and how well everyone else in the group did.

Performance Ratings
Don’t even get me started on the corporate merit ranking systems many of us use. Those of us that excel in our jobs really get screwed there. For example, on a performance scale of 1 through 5, one and two mean you’re almost on the way out the door so only slackers get those. No one ever gets a 5, it’s reserved for super human effort that saves/makes the company multiple millions of dollars and requires working 24/7 for months at a time.

Basically the mediocre workers get all 3’s and people like you and I get a few 3.5’s and maybe one or two 4’s. Sound familiar? Is it really worth all of our hard work to get a half point higher merit score which translates to a measly salary increase?

Freedom from Performance Reviews!
What if you take the same amount of effort you put into earning those 3.5’s and 4’s and apply it to your own endeavors? You’ll see rewards much sooner than the end of the year. You won’t have to wait for someone else to maybe recognize your hard work; your effort should result in a much faster increase in income if you’re working for yourself.

Of course you can’t quit your job tomorrow and start earning a salary for yourself the next day, so start building your business today and maybe by next year you’ll be free of your job and giving yourself your own performance review!

Many of us quit our job in our head hundreds of times over but never actually get around to doing it. What can you do to make freedom from the corporate world a reality? What if I told you there was a proven way that would allow you to quit your job?

The concept is actually quite simple; it’s all about making a decision to succeed and then taking action on it. A study by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) revealed the importance of setting a goal, creating a timeline, making a plan, committing to success, and making yourself accountable. The following percentages describe a person’s chance of successfully completing a goal based on the actions they take:

• Setting a Goal – 25%
• Creating a Timeline – 40%
• Making a Plan – 50%
• Committing to Another Person – 65%
• Setting & Meeting a Specific Accountability Appointment with the Person You Committed to – 95%

Why percentage do you want to be in? How does 95% sound to you? This study reminds us that we’re not going to get what we want by just wishing away our miserable job.

So how do you get to be in the 95^th percentile? Start at the beginning, set your goal of quitting your job. Not sure how you’re going to do it yet? That’s okay! By setting your goal you have a 25% chance of actually quitting! With your goal as your motivation you can then move on to determine how and when you’ll make enough money to quit.

That’s why this site exists, to help you figure out the how and when, then help you achieve those goals!

Being away from work for three days allows you to begin to forget all the unpleasantness that comes along with the job.  Your tolerance for incompetence and mind numbing activities decrease as the joy of living outside of work thaws the emotions you’ve frozen out of self defense.

Then Monday morning rolls around and you’re rudely plunged back into the world of TPS reports, buggy software, pagers, and deadlines.  Your body revolts and wants to dash for the exit but your mind visualize those bills sitting on the kitchen counter and forces you to remain in your chair.

Your chest is tight, your mind is racing.  “Why do I keep coming back to this place”, you frantically think.  “How can I get out of here!”.  As the weight of voice mails, projects, emails, and meetings slowly squeeze the energy out of your struggling mind you begin to give in.  The thrashing slows as you try to work through the to-do list and by the end of the long day; you’ve succumbed to the will of the corporate life-sucker.

As you shut down your work for the night you think to yourself, “One down, four to go till the weekend”.

Sound familiar?  How many Monday’s have you forced your unwilling psyche to shoulder the corporate baggage and live only for the weekends?  How much longer can you put up with the horrible events of Monday morning?  Isn’t there a better way?

I Hate the Pager
Isn’t it sad to think of the number of hours of our lives we’ve wasted acting as servant to the ever-insistent, ever-annoying pager? My latest experience came this Sunday afternoon as the pager chirped minutes after I sat down at my computer to work on my online businesses.

Wasted Hours
I called the number on the pager and gathered from the business person on the other end of the phone that there was a problem with a transmission from another division of the company. This is a client that’s been around for several years and the people that wrote the system have long since come and gone. My heart sunk as I realized the complexity of the issue, the outlook for my weekend afternoon, and the hopelessness of my situation.

Tech Support Sucks
Who likes spending a whole Sunday digging through poorly documented scripts, config files, and code trying to figure out how the hell a system works and why the foobar job won’t run? Everyone you call for help either doesn’t answer their phone or isn’t close to a computer so can’t help. Who blames them? I mean its Sunday, it’s supposed to be a day where you don’t have to worry about the corporate B.S. It’s supposed to be a day where you can live your life, free of the shackles of work.

Tell Someone Who Cares
Ever feel like telling someone that? They page you with this “urgent issue” in the middle of the night and you’re supposed to give a damn about it? I have no problem staying up to 2–3 in the morning working on web projects. I do it all the time, for MY own businesses. I’ll work all hours to make money for myself since my income will be in proportion to the amount of hours I work. In a corporate job, we get paid the same whether we work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week so what motivation do we have, other than keeping our job, to bust our ass when the pager goes off?

Working for Myself
I decided working insane hours just to keep my crappy job isn’t worth it when I can make more money and be happier working for myself. Do you have to carry a pager? What are you doing to free yourself from its brutal grip on your life?

Alternate Income
When I arrived home the family was in bed so I headed down to my office to my “second job” of making money online. I logged into my affiliate accounts and discovered I had made more money through affiliate sales that day than I had at work. I had expended ZERO effort that day on my websites yet earned more than I had working a 15 hour day at my crappy software job.

Discouragement
Okay, so that’s actually good news but I took it kind of hard that night. Why was I busting my ass and missing my family when I could be working on my own schedule, with less stress, and making more money? Of course it came down to consistency. I wasn’t making that much every day so I didn’t feel like I could just walk out of the door.

Determination for Success
I took a deep breath, I knew with hard work and the right mentoring I could get to the level of online income I needed to quit my job. I turned to my PC and got to work. What about you? What are you doing to get out of your miserable tech job so you can earn more with less stress?

Why You Should Quit Your Job, But Can’t
One thing I’ve learned about life so far is that it’s too short to spend doing something you don’t enjoy. Something else I’ve learned is that many things are easier said than done, especially things that are worth doing. It’s one thing to say “quit your job and find something that make you happy”, it’s entirely another thing to actually do it. I mean to actually pull the trigger, to walk out on a stable income source, especially when you have no idea what you’re going to do next!

Many of us in the tech industry face a dilema that others would love to have. We are well paid for what we do, even if we don’t enjoy doing it. Our skills are highly valued by employers and they’re willing to shell out the cash for our time. The problem we run into is that somewhere down the line we realize the stress and quality of life factors aren’t worth the money they’re paying us. By the time the dark side of the tech world rears its ugly head many of us are already hooked on the income.

The nuances of corporate moronity, time pressures, and 24/7 support make us miserable but we don’t know how to walk away to something entirely different and kiss that nice paycheck goodbye.

How to Make Money for Yourself
How can you apply your tech skills to make money for yourself? Of course if you had an answer to that question you might not be at this site in the first place. The truth is if you don’t have a way of earning income directly for yourself without going through an employer your options in life are more limited. Once you can use your skills to generate independent income you’re then free to decide what hours to work, what projects to work on, where you work, who to work with, what work you can do that makes you happy.

Many of us in the technology industry have come to value our time based on what an employer will pay us. Since we don’t know a way to make money directly off of our skills, we have to depend on a company for income. The whole point of this site is to help you evaluate the different opportunities you have as a technology professional to begin working for yourself instead of for a corporation. Of course, there is work, learning, and time involved in this endeavor but it’s definitely time and energy well spent.

Decide to Make a Change
The bad news is that you can’t make this transistion overnight. The good news is that your technology skills will help you jump into it with both feet and give you an edge. Okay, you won’t replace your income in a week, but the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll meet your goals. Signup for our free newsletter and you’ll get:

• Access to free resources on how you can get started in your niche with no money down and no risk.
• Regular updates on how to choose your niche on the Internet and become successful in it.

Avoiding Meetings
If you haven’t read the book the 4 Hour Work Week I’d recommend checking it out. The author, Tim Ferriss, talks about guarding your time by forcing as much communication and decision making as you can through email or phone calls and going to meetings as a last resort. He calls it “the art of refusal and avoiding meetings”.

Wasted Afternoon
I started applying his suggestions and found myself in fewer meetings and being more productive. Unfortunately, I’m not a productivity ninja like Tim and still get roped into meetings that are a waste of time. Just yesterday I thought I had successfully dodged a meeting that had no benefit to me until the last second when my boss swung by my cube and cornered me into wasting an hour of my time during a critical part of the afternoon.

Killer Zombie Meetings
These types of mindless meetings that keep you from getting your job done so you can get on with your life are just another reason that software jobs suck. We do what we can to avoid them but like a herd of killer zombies they just keep coming, and coming, and coming for us. There is no where to hide, you’ll have quit your job to finally be safe from the killer zombie meetings.

Now picture that event happening every month FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS! How does that make you feel, pretty crappy right?

Monthly Punishment
Most software jobs go in cycles with peaks and valleys in the workload as you work through a project. The peak time for our group is always at the end of the month, some month ends are better than others.

This coming cycle looked to be a reasonable one for me up until 2:30 this afternoon when that all changed within a five minute period. First I was informed that a client had just decided they wanted to implement a new feature and wanted it in two days. Shortly after that the on-call pager was dumped on me during the worst possible time, the weekend of month end.

Panicked & Miserable
The thing about events like this is that they happen all the time in the tech industry. In a matter of 5 minutes your life can go from being scheduled and comfortable to panicked and miserable.

The worst thing about it is you have no control over what will happen. If you want to keep working at your job, when your boss says that you’ll have it done in two days or offers you up to carry the pager over the weekend, that’s the way it is. You have to do what they “ask” even though it throws your life into complete disarray.

Quitting Your Job
I don’t know about you but I can’t stand the thought of going through this madness every month for the duration of a software career. Every time a “crisis” like this pops up and I get thrown under the bus I get one step closer to walking out the door. Luckily, I’ve been working on becoming financially self-sufficient outside of my job so the time will come when I really will leave and never look back.

What about you? What are you doing to get out of your crappy tech job and prevent it from ruining your life one crisis at a time?

Several other people in the group are software engineers and we were all bemoaning the negative aspects of our jobs and how we were counting down the days until we walked out the door. One of the guys who is in a different field all together posed a question to us:

“I find such quitting job conversations very amusing. Is this sort of a norm in the software industry ? … I mean I have quite a few friends in software development and none of them seem happy with their jobs. Is it because there is no such thing as “career development” ? or is it because of other reasons? “

Of course I won’t go into the reasons why here since that would take more time than we have but needless to say we provided him more than enough reasons that I’ll cover individually down the road.

I found this email exchange quite discouraging. Different developers working for different companies in multiple areas of the country all came up with the same gripes about the industry. Sure it’s not a scientific study but in my mind it proved a point, software jobs suck!

There are many people I work with that voice the same concerns I heard in those emails, yet they do nothing about it. I’m glad I’m part of the group that’s decided to make a change and take a different direction with my life. Which group are you in?