You can be evangelical in all positions -- make sure you do a respectable work wherever you are and people will respect you and your opinions. If the job looks better, go for it!
This is time to use your intuition, not to be rational. If you stay rational you will never change jobs because your brain can invent and pretend that your current job is the best and the opposite is the worse.
Man, I'd like to let you to know something: it's not about how fucked up you are, but how you deal with it.
Just to begin, I live in the third world and you live the life I wish I could.
So, you can get a job somewhere else. Do it. Now, let's put some focus on your life: YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING.
I have quit my job also but I got my shit straight by doing college and shit, even though I'm from a poor family and all my class had more money and 'happiness' than me.
You know what? Happiness comes from the inside, from the outlook you have of life. If you created this post right here, right now, that can only mean a good thing: you are striving for the best. I've been suicidal for a long time in my life and thats because I was trying, you know. It was hard as hell, but that made me hard, and this is what you become once you go over all those problems, everything will look small.
Congratulations Hampton! You do an awesome job for the open source community with not only sass but all your other projects(like haml). I think this moment is important because it shows that we aren't a community of prejudice but respect.
I get almost 10 minimum wages with 24 and I think that I'm underpaid(and I am...). I was making WAY MORE money working as a freelancer than working for a company here but it seems that people(and the government) only respect who is employed by a company, otherwise I will never be able to buy a car or a house with a loan. Our government sucks.
College on Brazil is alright, the problem is with research culture -- horribly bad. Teachers on universities are rated by how much shit they published instead of the quality of their work.
The academic field is very bad for anybody wanting to study something advanced but at least in computer science, being a undergrad is just fine. You learn the same shit that the MIT does, the problem is 1. the people of your class, 2. your teachers don't do anything interesting to inspire you.
Keep your job and do interviews for companies in the $75-90k range.
It won't look so bad as much as you think if you leave after fiding another job. You negotiated badly and they ripped you off... also, a >50% raise should always be a reason to leave your current company, it doesn't matter if you are there for a week or a decade.
You are the "prize", start acting like it and they will treat you like so.
Well, I think I'm going to be disrespectful and uneducated for a minute.
Listen, don't throw me inside your "generation" when you mean "lazy american SF hipster startup guys".
I live in Brazil, my life is like this: I sleep @ 11pm and wakeup @ 4am... I take 4 hours trips to work because I don't have a car. When I get to work, I have to lead a team. I go to gym, 3 times a week. I hold a bachelor in CS. I maintain good/famous projects in Github. I study regularly(currently trying to learn some erlang). I speak two languages well, my mother language and english.
I came from a fucking poor family where you wouldn't even UNDERSTAND of what's like to live there. I'm 24 and I don't have a fucking driver's license.
I earn 50% of a american shitty developer and I lead a team. Cars are at least 4x more expensive here than your country that have been winning the world by making wars and slaving people in a smart way that human rights doesn't really consider it slavery.
So, fuck you and "YOUR" generation. Stop making HN SHIT just publishing fucking damn articles and shitty blog posts. Stop fighting against the other retarded people that just wanted to make excuses.
There's actually people here like me that are desperate for doing something interesting for the humanity. So, shut the fuck up.
It's not so hard as you think to get into USP. Actually, it's kinda easy if your family paid you a good education by brazilian terms, which basically means you studied in ETAPA or Objetivo and can't reason about more important matters but have over 9000 test exercises under your belt.
I advise you to not give a shit about it because you can learn way more at home, unless you want a degree. If you do want that piece of paper with their name, study and get inside.
99,9999% of research there is shit, if you are serious about it, try to find a way to move and study abroad(depends highly on your family's social status, hehe).
Contribute to open source projects. As soon as you have commit access to gcc, you will be making at least $200k+ year, hehe.
But seriously, devote sometime to create your image, whether writing open source or giving presentations. It's good and it makes you more skillful. I actually love writing OSS, even more than money.
A good freelance job offer usually COMES to you. The one I've been working to I've got from a HN spreadsheet. I contribute to one of the libraries that they used internally in the project so... they accepted me at first sight.
I don't have your amount of experience and I make ~$40/h(which is low by market's standard!). Having good communication skills and being able to let your client have almost no overhead from managing you can clearly be VERY VALUABLE. It's actually the employer's dream to find someone like this.
I've also worked with bad freelance jobs: didn't pay me in time, codebase was shitty and so on. I advise you to drop ship and look for something else. I have pleasure when I work
Aim to be a contractor bringing way more on the table than just flipping bits skills. :-)
This is time to use your intuition, not to be rational. If you stay rational you will never change jobs because your brain can invent and pretend that your current job is the best and the opposite is the worse.