I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) co

I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) company. I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work. When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.