Now, after having left work due to personal reasons, I don’t feel like returning to work at smaller companies/faang due to fear of office politics and lack of challenging work.
I can work on open-source and my own projects but seem to not want to go back into work-life as it was before the pandemic struck.
Any advice you have for me will be much appreciated. I seem to have lost passion for my work but I need to be able to pay my bills.
outside of that, can't say i'm confident this is great advice but i do try to follow it, for better or worse.
Chomsky says something like, "find a problem you are interested in solving, then try to solve it."
that seems to me like a pretty good way to go.
maybe go for a 4 day work week. that leaves a real weekend, at least. to me, a 4-day, at $100k+ salary, is worth a salary reduction of at least 20%, maybe more, but that's just me. many places will claim to pay the full 100%.
i always think of Monograph -- project mgmt software for architects -- i've no connection to them:
this site lists 4-day jobs, if not many of them:
also, contracting can give you a nice separation of YOU from THE COMPANY.
HN has their monthly "Who's hiring?" pages.
you're prob a bit depressed, so might want to do all the things that people say to do when that happens. oddly, going back to work might be a good thing, assuming it's not horrific.