Three options spring to mind:
- Start your own company, either products or services
- Join a startup that is generous with equity, as an early employee
- Join a worker co-op (not that many of these generally, but IME they're overrepresented in software)
You basically want skin in the game, from the sounds of it, and employment generally doesn't offer this (intentionally).
I've never heard of a worker coop. That's an interesting idea. Are there any software ones that are especially well known?
I don't believe so, because pretty much all of the household-name software companies are VC-backed and worker coops are not equity-based so they don't get VC backing; as such, they tend to be SMEs. I've known a couple of people who founded worker coops though.
There's a list of coops here that I just found: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops