I've faced situations like yours. Your expectations are totally reasonable IMO, but, in order to promote a significant change at the current company, you may ha

I've faced situations like yours. Your expectations are totally reasonable IMO, but, in order to promote a significant change at the current company, you may have to go through a probably long process with many layers of human factors involved. I don't feel myself in a proper position to give you advice, since my experience is limited. But, some things I've seen working: - identify whether there is a "dominant group" that enjoys some sort of political influence and are trusted by the direct manager. This is important. They are usually the oldest ones at the team and, as they got trust and respect from the management, they also got out of the pace with good practices applied elsewhere. Be careful with them, in case this group exists, because they won't let you proceed with such "disruptive" ideas risking to make evident that there's always been a better, more productive way, but they haven't applied them for pure inertia. - if you have the opportunity, and think it's worth the effort, try to deploy or build some small tools/processes/etc and show them. That will be very eloquent examples; - don't be concerned about taking credit. Everybody is interested on being more productive, but human emotions will always prevail over any rational need. I'm proud for having built some productivity tools in use for 15 years now in a company I've worked for, and almost nobody knew that I was the author. The "architecture" team wrapped them up on a asp.net web app and took all the credit. That's fine considering I achieved a more important goal. If I had attempted to bypass the architecture team and promoted my tool independently, it would probably have not been put in use. And always bear in mind that this is usually a long term effort and you have to continuously assess if it's worth. Maybe other non technical aspects counterbalance the issues, maybe not. Some of my happiest years were spent working on legacy, terrible code. But this is a very personal and multifaceted decision.