I was in your situation for a while. I love writing code, but I hate working for a company. The meetings, spending months (or years) working on a project only to have it canceled, having to be at the office at a certain time, having to wait until 5pm to leave (despite having my work done)...
Here's what I did: I worked for a non-profit for a while. The pay was not great, but it was good enough to pay off a significant part of my mortgage and also save some money. I was writing Free Software for the non-profit, and upstreaming lots of code, which helped my career. I did have to deal with meetings and office culture, but the fact that I didn't feel like I was wasting my time helped me deal with that.
After a few years of that, I quit and started freelancing. This allowed me to charge a lot, while keeping both my living expenses and business expenses to a very mustachian level* (for example, I'd never buy a new laptop; I'd get an old thinkpad off of ebay for $300). Because my name was already out there in a bunch of git repositories, I had clients finding me (including the old non-profit, who hired me for another few projects after I had left). I worked from home, and kept meetings to a minimum. It was a much better way to work.
When my son was born, I finished up the remaining contracts and retired. It was about 7 years from when I realized that I was miserable working to when I retired. I also had 3-4 years before that of working from when I actually thought I enjoyed it. All told, an 11 year career.
* Note: this was all before I discovered MMM. I already lived frugally, and I actually retired before discovering MMM. However, MMM helped me figure out how to properly retire. The 4% rule, how to properly invest (it's kind of embarrassing how much money I had in cash, with a mindset of "I'll just retire and live off this for the next 20+ years until it runs out, and then... who knows!), and so on.