[burntoutfire]

> it was that the set of problems that are worth solving in today's economy and can be solved by one person (or even a small team) is vanishingly small, and I just had a bigger impact when working with larger organizations.

That's an important observation. There isn't really that much interesting technical work left that a single programmer can do, as the field has been thoroughly mined for such work for decades now.

Interestingly, it's very different in art world - in technology, the new solution has to be an improvement upon state of the art, whereas in creative pursuits it merely has to be different and interesting. Hence, there's basically infinite work left for writers, painters, solo musicians etc.

[nostrademons]

It's cyclical in tech too. There are subfields of tech where one person can still do useful original work - cryptocurrency, for example, or drones, or some of the low-level kernel hacking like the recent io_uring post. The key is "impact", though - because those are currently hobbies that aren't really ready for mainstream consumption, you're not really going to make an economic difference with your work. There's a tipping point that needs to be crossed where a little subfield becomes a big business, and then suddenly all the folks that were playing around with that technology end up sitting on a gold mine of a career.