More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved.

I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.

I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.

That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.