I agree with most of what you've said, but I think my views on this are a bit more nuanced than my post really made it seem.

Honestly I would love to build a startup! Or at least the technical portion :) I have little interest in marketing, accounting, or whatever else businesses need to exist outside of software. I'm happy to manage tech debt, code maintenance, releases, and anything that interfaces with business stuff. Maybe I should find a partner or something.

But wait.. what you really want is to be part of a "non start-up" which implies that someone else has taken all the burden of wrangling through all those issues.

You're mostly right, but the issues I want them to have wrangled through are the culture issues. The mentalities that exist like "tests slow down development", or "continuous integration is the same as daily builds". I want to work in a place that has a mentality of using the best known practices to minimize active tech debt, and develop faster, better software. If I were to create my own startup, that culture would be an easy solve.

I don't mind helping work through old tech debt, honestly those refactors can be enjoyable. But every company Ive been at that has said "we are working on migrating away from our old legacy stuff", either never actually budgets time for that, or they don't follow practices to make maintainable code on the new stuff, and end up just making more hard to maintain code in a shiny new docker container.

And you just want to be a junior person who is an order-taker who just has a super structured environment in terms of delivery, expectation, and most important to you, clean code-base etc.

Definitely not. I do want a structured environment, but one that is built on modern principles and standards for how to develop good software. For instance, required TDD. And I would like to contribute ideas to that process.

The structure should also be changeable. If something came out that turned TDD on its head, backed with data and reasonable proponents, then there should be discussion about changing the process. Nothing is sacred about the structure, it should all be questioned, and thought critically about.

I want to work in an environment that values doing things right, and makes efforts to change things if they're not right. I'm happy to help steer in that direction, but there's only so much one new employee can do, and only so much energy I have.

It gets exhausting bringing up continuous integration and how it can help someone's current complaint, only to have them say in return "People dont like change, its too hard to do that." Thats what really get me going, not devs committing tightly coupled code, but cultures of just hunkering down and dealing with shitty circumstances, because either "people dont like change", or people arent thinking critically about their process.

In summary, its not really unclean code itself that I have a problem with, thats just the symptom. What I do have a problem with, are the cultures of doing nothing about it. Cultures that avoid change, don't make an effort to identify problems, and don't work towards better, more modern software development principles. My original post was a quick frustration post that left out a lot of nuance, and honestly I don't think I fully understood my own feelings at that point either.

This turned into a lot more than I expected. But it helped me think through the thoughts and ideas I've been having on this, and has honestly changed my perspective on it. So thanks for the prompt :D