My career (if may be called that) can be summarized by a constant swing.
On one side, I have a "job" where I start well but after a while I fall out of grace from higher-ups because I inevitably end up calling out their bullshit and/or start seeing the pointlessness of it all and lose interest in progressing there. This leads me to either quitting or getting fired, which brings me to the other side of the swing: I dive into another project where I try to do everything "my way", no compromises, no shortcuts, no justification of "best practices" because "that is how everyone else does it".
While I am on this side, I feel incredibly productive and I am forced to grow/learn a lot of things that are required to the problem at hand. Yet, because of this hard-line stance on not compromising, my projects gets either out-competed by a startup that was (rightly) willing to take the shortcuts I didn't take, or I end up building something that had no market for, or (worse) there is a market and no strong competitor but I refused to pivot out of the original idea for a matter of "principle" that only I cared about - hub20 definitely fell into that category.
When I am finally out of steam (or financial reserves), I go back into the job market, usually with a renewed set of skills which helps me land a job that was better than the previous one, and the cycle is complete.
Honestly, I am tired of this. These swings were fun for the first 3 or 4 times but now I am increasingly feeling that my luck will run out soon and that I need to get out of this swing, no matter on what end. Either I finally make one of my projects more than a nice portfolio piece or I learn how to settle and navigate the corporate world without hating it and myself so much.