It's interesting to hear the diversity of experience. I worked at a startup and I built a lot of stuff. Like all day everyday. Close to no meetings. Mostly ad hoc stuff with product managers and other engineers. Bigger companies though I hear is kind of rough depending on the team.
The autonomy is definitely great. I also love the range of problems I get to solve. It's the best creative outlet I've ever found. I'm considering light freelance work though. It might be the best of both worlds.
I've tried freelance before - close but no cigar. At the end of the day, you still have a boss and someone telling you how to spend your time and when tasks are supposed to be done by which date in which order -> which is what I hate. I think I just have authority problems in general so YMMV
If it's not a ridiculously complicated project, I like to build stuff immediately. I'm trying to avoid the situation where I lose enthusiasm for a project because it's not something 'real'. The coroner says most of my projects have died this way.
So I'm trying to get something out in a weekend this time around.
I'm not doing anything particularly complicated. The tech is just simple web dev stuff. For most stuff, I work in a pre-validated market with lots of competitors. I'm not exactly betting the entire house on one bet working off either.
My next project is just something fun and useful, without much thought for monetization.
Ideally, you have boilerplate with all the plumbing + apis for shared code between projects with analytics, payments, auth, etc (something like shipfa.st/ but for your own preferred stack) and try to cut corners by using BaaS/CMS/UI Templates/same tech stack every time/paid solutions.
This is what I'm trying to do for upcoming projects. Hope it helps.
Thank you so much @igas! What a nice offer. Sounds fun.