I was involved in a startup for a year that ended early last year because the person funding it got cold feet - it was his idea. As a result, I basically took the first job I could find, which is in the finance industry. My roles to date have largely been around management of people and architecture.

My home town is literally at the bottom end of Australia. Beautiful place but there are very few development jobs and no paying startups here.

I have a child with another on the way. My partners salary is insufficient for us to live on.

My job is a dev at a medium size company (around 300). The development in this company is appalling, non scoring on the Joel test and the work is boring. There is no challenge, people play games on their phone and sleep all day. The managers are micromanagers and the developers sit at the bottom of the org chart (this is a software company).

I'm building a cool product out of work, but I'm at it alone and I fear that someone will beat me to market (trying for bare minimum viable product). I also fear burn out (has happened before), the company attempting to invoke its IP clause of contract when they find out (legal advice has been that they have no ground).

I'm working 8h a day in my day job and 5-6h a night on the startup. I take weekends off to spend time with the family.

I have a deep understanding and portfolio of experience across mainframe development, enterprise Java, .NET, mobile apps & web development. I need something that challenges me - moving is off the cards due to baby #2 & I doubt selling remote work (if I can find a reliable income stream) to my partner.

For those who have been in similar situations: how did you manage and balance everything?