Ask HN: Doing well solo, struggling in team-centric engineering roles

I’m an experienced engineer who works very effectively on projects I fully own (personal apps, tools, solo work), but consistently struggle in team environments where ownership is shared, communication overhead is high, and success depends more on alignment and signaling than execution.

I’m not talking about skill gaps — the issue seems structural. I do fine when incentives, authorship, and responsibility are clear, but disengage when those are diffuse. This has started to affect job stability, especially in the current market.

I’m curious whether others recognize this pattern, and if so: • Have you found ways to operate sustainably in team-heavy orgs? • Did you move toward contracting, smaller teams, or different roles? • Or did you accept this as a constraint and optimize around it?

I’m explicitly not looking for motivation advice — more for patterns and tradeoffs people have observed.