Ask HN: Techniques for surviving a job you loathe?

I would love to get some advise from people who have been in less than ideal situations and how they got through it. I would love to know techniques for dealing stress, mundane work environments, and not being challenged. 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 manage