[mikestew]

"I sometimes wonder if they would have had a chance if I'd joined them."

Maybe if you joined as VP of Engineering or CTO. As an IC, all you're going to do is get dragged down with them, and go home pissed off every night.

I've been there. A company has no existing test infrastructure, it's all done by hand, and the build "system" are the binaries that come off a dev's machine? No problem! I'm you're man, I'll have you up and automated in a jiffy. Except that the reason there's no existing infrastructure now is because of general cluelessness, not for lack of expertise.

You need someone to hook the hoozit that I lightly touched last time I was there to your new whatzit? Yeah, I'll come in on a contract basis to get it sorted. My first clue should be that none of the other devs who know it better than I came to your rescue. No specs for the thing I'm supposed to integrate with, no documentation as to what it is you actually want, and a PM that sits and watches YouTube videos all day? Yeah, I should have guessed.

It's top-down, and if you're not at the top, you're not going to save them from themselves.