> I work well on teams, my teammates like me, but I've always preferred solo work. I think this is a stable personality trait, as I remember feeling like this a

> I work well on teams, my teammates like me, but I've always preferred solo work. I think this is a stable personality trait, as I remember feeling like this as early as kindergarten. This describes me for the first 3 decades of my career. I can now enjoy working together on solving problems. In particular full-time pair programming was brutal at first but then you hit a groove and it's great. No specific advice here, merely a self observation. > Other factors include the already incredibly complex social problems that come from developing software with a team of humans, the monster that Agile / Scrum have become, bizarre and poorly thought out technical decisions, failed projects, endless meetings, and being told what to do by people who have never written any code. My advice would be to find a company that has/does less of these things you dislike. The best setup I had was working on a 2-pizza-sized 'platform team' for a ~100 person startup. There was a good mix of developing new features, scaling, and firefighting (that we learned to reduce applying SRE practices). We could start with a problem, whiteboard ideas, start prototyping, finally end up shipping the solution in the same sprint for an unplanned issue. > being told what to do by people who have never written any code I wouldn't say this is a good view to hold and may be a source of discontent. The 'what' is really a product question answered by knowing your customers and markets. I wouldn't expect devs to be experts here. The how, at what cost, or when would be better to execute are areas that devs mainly contribute. I do get a sense of what you generally mean though, and my solution had been to work at smaller companies with strong technical management (preferably up to the CTO and/or CEO) and very little to no middle management.