I've had two positions where most of my work was doing nothing but working in other teams. In one I was part of a computer simulation group where other teams i

I've had two positions where most of my work was doing nothing but working in other teams. In one I was part of a computer simulation group where other teams in the company would come to us with simulation problems and one of us would go join their meetings, learn the problem, and work on it with them. Usually short term for weeks to months, though there were often repeat embeddings. In the other position I worked as a programmer supporting research and usually worked on multiple grant funded projects at the same time and the grants often ran out and new grants came in. So my work and the people I worked with was always changing and professors would often "borrow" or "loan" me to other professors. Professors and students would come and go adding more churn to the nature of the work. Sometimes I had a say in which projects I wanted to work on, sometimes I didn't. Technically I could have moved to any grant funded job in the university, moving from the CS to the Physics dept for example. In practice there wasn't a lot of grant funding that included funding for a staff programmer so I tended to work with a fairly small group of professors who brought in other professors on their projects. In some of my other jobs shifting departments or teams would have been very difficult, the teams were territorial and kept boundaries and moving across those boundaries would be taken as a betrayal, so even if it was possible it would have created ill will between the teams, making working together more difficult. I recommend avoiding places like that. Yet another workplace sought government grants and would encourage everyone to shop themselves to the various teams currently seeking grants. If the team won a grant you could stay with them and work on the grant. Or you could move to another grant seeking team and work with them. All you had to to was find someone who would give you a paycode to put on your weekly report, which was where your salary came from. I had a boss, but if I found my own paycode sources he was happy. It was described to me as forming small companies inside the main company.