Leave work early and have a side-hustle.

Because you are not going to stay in the corporate world for long if you love hands-on technical work like coding, even if you are in a tech firm.

The longer you work, you are going to realize the only way up is to move to management or sales.

When that time comes, you no longer touch code. You will make a lot more money, but you would probably miss coding and do it on your free time anyway.

The alternative is that you stay as a line level grunt, making considerably less money than your peers who have moved up, and becoming disillusioned with the company, the industry, or life in general.

Either way, your only hope is what you do in your free time. If there’s one thing in the world left for a technical person to do with all the limited time he/she has in life, it is to code.

By learning new technologies or even practicing your existing skills, you could either 1) build your own profitable products, 2) start a profitable consulting practice, or even 3) find a better job oppportunity.

Thinking back, I should even start when I was in university.