[safety1st]

I tend to think that many people try to over-optimize for joy in their work when doing so is impractical. Context definitely matters. As a founder or early employee you have comparatively a lot more agency in terms of shaping your work environment. At bigger companies you have much less, and you probably don't even understand the context your work matters in. At the end of the day everyone's really working for the board and the shareholders, but in most cases employees can't even tell you who those people even are, let alone what they care about. (Hint, at a sufficiently large public company, it's a good bet that people like managers of pension funds which bought your stock have some very big voices, and barely know what your company's vision is, let alone care, and that's just the nature of the game.)

It's this reality which leads to people inevitably feeling betrayed by a company as it grows - e.g. everyone thinking that "Don't be evil" was a thing Google could and would live up to after becoming successful. But at modern Google scale it is just not a realistic expectation.

There's always another path which is to take a more holistic look at life and say "I may not get a ton of joy from my job, but I source joy from other things that my job enables, so that's OK."