Yes, I have done this. I joined a small start-up as a developer, and they admitted they needed to increase their professionalism and they would stand behind me

Yes, I have done this. I joined a small start-up as a developer, and they admitted they needed to increase their professionalism and they would stand behind me as I did so. This was around 2005 or so when standards weren't as good as they are now. Management consisted of designers and a self-taught programmer. While extremely intelligent, his ego could get in the way of making a good design decision - he didn't take kindly to constructive criticism or alternative ideas and would sometimes invent articles he had supposedly read that supported his biases. This was effectively the number one problem and in retrospect after identifying this, I should have left much sooner. They failed every single question in the Joel Test and by the end the only points I had managed to change were to introduce source control and to introduce a bug database. I look back on those days and I did enjoy the working environment to an extent and I enjoyed working with the people and even the technical co-founder was a really good guy out of work (and as I said, next-level intelligent) but the engineering culture was preventing me from doing my best work so I quit. The final straw was when I was being shouted at in front of a client for introducing a bug in production that I could have sworn I had fixed weeks ago. After investigating it I discovered the co-founder had made a change, encountered a failing unit test and just deleted the test instead of fixing the underlying problem. The commit message was just "z" and came along with a few dozen unrelated changes. The company is still around and I understand doing well. Every now and again though I encounter their product and I'm able to replicate a bug I first added to the bug tracker in around 2006. I feel they are doing well because they had a genuinely good idea and brought it to market sooner than anyone. I won't say who they are because I don't wish to publicly shame them. I hope they have a better engineering culture now. The next company I worked for had all the same problems except for the co-founder with an ego problem and I was able to get them to an extremely high level of professionalism and left behind an extremely high functioning software team after I moved on to the next level in my career. To conclude: If your company has a poor engineering culture and it is getting in the way of you doing your best work then you should resign and find another job. You can still see the people you like at that company socially if you want but staying there won't help your career.