First, I realized that there are two types of happiness relevant to a job. There is happiness through satisfaction in what you have, and happiness through greater achievement. I suspect these are actually personality traits. Some people are good at being happy with what they've got. I'm not.

Then I realized I would never have happiness through satisfaction in my current job. Even if I succeeded wildly and became a VP or CEO one day. At a very deep level, I hate the feeling of disdain from entrepreneurs. Larry and Sergey won't respect you in the morning, indeed.

Then I convinced myself that my full-time employment was not on a trajectory that would bring me full happiness ever. And life is short.

Thus, the logical conclusion. Change is necessary.

I don't have cofounders, so I'll strike out on my own for a while and see what I can build. I'll go to grad school and find cofounders.

Now, details. I talked my way into a good school long after application deadlines. This satisfies important stakeholders such as my parents.

I gave myself enough unemployed time before school to be able to hack something and test out how I work when I am my boss.

I saved a year's living expenses while employed. I moved to 50% less expensive housing and cut other expenses.

I was diplomatic at work about my departure. I didn't burn bridges. I resisted the temptation to vent about everything I thought was wrong about the company and the job. If everything fails, I have a safety net that is only slightly worse than if I didn't take the plunge. I gave my manager notice. I told him my end date was flexible so he had a chance to deal with staffing issues and I could wrap up work. It ended up being a month's notice. Not so long that I waste a lot of time checked out, but long enough that it is a happy parting.

My last day is Friday.

I had a few major events in my life that woke me up to these same concepts.

" full-time employment was not on a trajectory that would bring me full happiness ever. And life is short." - exactly.

Change is also very important to keep me going - and being pigeonholed in a small role at work always frustrated me too. Glad to see it isn't just me!

It was difficult because I loved the people I was working with, but disliked the actual work (and had been promised more interesting work but got tired of waiting for it. I kept in touch with my ex-coworkers and I know the more interesting work would've materialized in another few months had I stayed). I also had other job offers at the time, and knew no one who had gone down this path. None of this made it easy.

So I "eased" my way in. I switched to working part-time (again, I had the fortune to work with great people at the time - they were sorry to see me go, but very supportive of my decision). It eventually became obvious that even part-time work was too big a distraction, so I quit entirely after about a month.

Not the most spectacular story, but I haven't regretted the decision.

Mine's been going a similar route... I actually even relocated because the job description sounded pretty exciting (technically challenging, even), but it ended up being the same sort of thing as the government contracting work that I was trying to escape from, but with even older technology. Since it ended up being largely a software life-support role, I'm working on bootstrapping my own business interests... but my focus isn't on software, it's on photography. I've spent so much time in roles like this one that I'm getting tired of the field altogether, mainly because life-support jobs are so anti-creative.