[projectramo]

I am surprised no one has said "can't you capture that feeling in another job"

Thinking out aloud, the things you may like about what you were doing: creativity, problem solving, programming, the debug loop, focus etc probably exist in other tasks.

However, in order to be useful there are many "boring" to you (but interesting to others) things that have to be done: someone has to raise money to support you while you work on it, someone has to convince others they should spend money on it and so forth.

Ideally, you would focus on what you love, but let others do the parts you don't, which is exactly what a company ought to be.

Perhaps you can recapture that feeling in the context of a company.

[psyc]

This would be ideal! I've been able to capture something like this for brief periods, but it's an unstable situation. Most of the time, processes and team dynamics strike me as highly dysfunctional, as if designed to destroy productivity. I have worked on about 10 different teams, and 4 of those were pleasant and reasonably productive experiences. The rest I could mine for a lot of stand-up comedy material.

The main problems: Autonomy, ownership, and true responsibility. Even for people with 'senior' in their title, on many teams/companies these are nowhere to be found.