Exactly the same for me: some of my best work and most enjoyable time has been collaborating closely with people. And yet, some of my worst time has been in set

Exactly the same for me: some of my best work and most enjoyable time has been collaborating closely with people. And yet, some of my worst time has been in settings that can also be described as collaborative! What made a difference? I see it as having two types of "collaboration": working together vs working on the same thing in parallel. The problem is that the formal processes managers use to ostensibly encourage collaboration—and, of course, to track and direct individual work—push hard towards the latter model. Everybody working on their own tasks makes the work so much more legible! Having some other person or some process determine who works on what, when and then implicitly (or explicitly!) judging people based on how quickly they complete "their" tasks is not only awful for autonomy and job satisfaction but also actively makes it harder to collaborate meaningfully. I've worked on teams where people were afraid to spend too much time working together or helping each other because they didn't want to "waste" the other person's time—after all, you're clearly wasting time if you aren't consistently producing finished tickets!—which is absolutely toxic for creativity, culture and collaboration, but also a natural response to the incentives and structure imposed by the process. I'm gradually starting to look for my next job and finding a culture where I can actually collaborate is one of my main goals, but it seems hard to evaluate from the outside. It's not clear how much an individual manager can do to foster the right sort of environment—a lot depends on the culture and structure at higher levels on the organization, as well as cross-team interactions—and it's the sort of thing where everyone is going to say their team is collaborative (and even believe it), and I don't see how a team could show rather than just say that.