I think you just gave words to something I'd noticed about myself but had never been able to articulate, which is the reason I can't operate in large companies. Every time a company gets past its first thousand employees, I have to find another job, because it starts to become as you describe and it feels like it grinds my soul to dust.
I'm convinced there do need to be big companies, therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a criticism in any way.
It just helped me understand why my career has consisted largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the companies finally reach a point where I have more than three layers of management, a majority of whom have no idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.
It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues." It's that there's something that happens to companies when they get large that turns a work environment I enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant for me.
If I were interested in doing the work I am able to do, and if my life satisfaction depended on this fulfillment, I would never work where I work. That would be intolerably frustrating.
But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine with my current situation.
This actually corresponds to another thing I've only recently admitted to myself, namely that I put a lot more pressure on my job for meaning and satisfaction because I'm compensating for perceived deficits in other areas of my life, like not having a spouse or children, even though those are important to me (not just a societal pressure).
I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.
If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.
Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I was working for more than 60 hours a week, often on weekends. On the whole it was enjoyable, but then I realized that I was spending an enormous amount of time writing papers that ten people, if I was lucky, would cite, for a far-from-guaranteed professional future in academia, setting aside my romantic and social life because, in the end, overcoming the inertia there seemed more challenging and tiresome than simply occupying my time trying to develop a fairly useless but potentially-perceived-as-novel algorithm.
Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.
I'm convinced there do need to be big companies, therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a criticism in any way.
It just helped me understand why my career has consisted largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the companies finally reach a point where I have more than three layers of management, a majority of whom have no idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.
It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues." It's that there's something that happens to companies when they get large that turns a work environment I enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant for me.