I did this after 9 years. My M.O. in a new job is to find a pain point and fix it quickly. Specifically, find a pain point that either directly impacts producti

I did this after 9 years. My M.O. in a new job is to find a pain point and fix it quickly. Specifically, find a pain point that either directly impacts productivity, customers, sales, ect. If you're "allowed" to fix the pain point, it's a good sign. If you have resistance, run quickly. It means that management doesn't know how to handle your expertise. Why? You're a lead, you should be able to see problems a mile away. Your new company should trust your expertise to anticipate and fix problems. Examples: I joined a company with a Mac product that would peg the CPU for days. It was impacting sales. Took me and another developer ~6 weeks to refactor some bad design decisions in a critical area. Pegging the CPU for days dropped to 1-2 minutes. (If I wasn't allowed to fix it I was going to leave.) I joined another company that was using a beyond end-of-life web programming language. The lead developer resisted my efforts to transition to modern Javascript, and resisted my efforts to transition to modern hosted source control. It ended poorly, although there was a lot of relief when the leadership announced that they were switching to Github. (I should have asked them to lay me off so I could collect unemployment.) I joined a company where a small team had a project spread over 3 git repos, with tons of little dlls. Simple refactors that Visual Studio could automate would take all day. I merged everything into a single repo, and merged many small dlls into larger dlls. Build time was much shorter, and refactoring was possible. (If I wasn't able to fix the problem, I was going to leave.)