Ask HN: How do I get out of megacorp IT and get back to hacking?

So I pretty much bombed an interview at a fun, young tech company. I've been programming in Java at a megacorp changing 1 line of code or so per month for almost 2 years. For comparison, many "programmers" here don't even know how to program.

I knew I needed to get out. They asked me things like, what's not guaranteed in a HashMap? I answered "order." Good, now what are a couple other implementations of Map, what's different, and how have you used them. I of course haven't used them in this environment.

So, I go on HN and start reading about your guys fun with Scala and Go, remembering my M.S. CS courses on the topics, and start realizing I'm missing out on all the fun.

My question is, anyone else in this position? Anyone made a change successfully? Any advice on getting back to a more developer-friendly environment?