[a15971]

I regret to inform you that this is a normal situation. In economy, you have to do what's useful for other people and not neccessarily what's fun.

Of course there are jobs at the intersection of those sets, but also there is much competition for them. It's harder to find them and you might have to accept lower pay for them.

You also mention "corporate world": larger teams impose their tax on participants. "The Mythical Man-Month" book (by Frederick Brooks) says that for a team of size n you have n(n−1)/2 possible communication paths between participants, which means that the communication and coordination overhead rises much faster than the team size. This accounts for half of your time being taken by "process".

So small companies migth be more interesting, but also riskier (because small companies are tipically start-ups which haven't yet confirmed the validity of their business model). Of course there are exceptions, but on average this also means you get paid less.

One case study for fun job is id Software at the beginning - the guys who developed Doom, the first significant 1st person shooter game. In early 1990ties it was the most installed software on computers by one Microsoft study (googling for details left as an exercise for the reader). The game was technological breaktrough, something new, it had massive impact and was financially successful. And you bet they had a lot of fun doing it.

Edit: corrected the group intercommunication formula

[thedevil]

I'd like to know how to find jobs that do intersect between fun and pay. I'm okay getting paid less, actually, as long as I can pay my bills. I took a 50% pay cut to change to software engineering.