What changed towards the end of each of those 2 year periods? Was it that management started screwing up more or that you had become integrated enough to recog

What changed towards the end of each of those 2 year periods? Was it that management started screwing up more or that you had become integrated enough to recognize screw ups they were making the whole time? Maybe you need a change of perspective. As some of the others here have suggested, you can become a contractor, but even as an employee you can think like a contractor. You can still be bought into the project and still be a good team member while thinking about it as "you" working for "them," rather than everything being "we" and "us." If they make bad decisions and ask you to do something that doesn't make sense, you can have a less negative outlook than if we make bad decisions. So my suggestions are: start out as highly skeptical and assume that management decisions are crap from the start because they probably are and don't internalize the team's failures or poor decisions when you had nothing to do with them.