I'm a (Java) developer for more than 15 years, and have always been in love with my profession because of simple reason that any sufficiently large project has countless places for improvement, and whenever I invested effort into analysis and subsequenet bigger refactor/rewrite, it paid off massively, for everyone.Now, if someone sees sentence above like advertising my tech superiority, I want to say that tech knowledge has never been the issue in my opinion since a lot of other coworkers had more than sufficient tech knowledge. The problem was that they simply were lacking the passion and courage to realize some bigger code change, to try our few different ideas, or even lack of belief that the work can bring such a massive benefits. It was mostly the stance like - "initial idea works 'sort of', so who cares anymore...". And to be honest, I basically never seen a truly great piece of software done with big amount of devs, so I always felt best within very small teams.And funny, I find many blogs around that describe horror stories after such big refactors/rewrites, but strangely, it has never been my experience, and believe me, I've done them A LOT!And despite any of my former coworkers and companies respecting me immensely, and constantly call you to come work for them again, I had many cases in my life, where I didn't even pass first live (non-coding) interview in front of people that completely don't know me. Although it was never a big blow, because there are so many IT oportunities out there, I was always wondering a bit what chase them away. My rate is definitely not an issue, so most of time I concluded that showing the passion and autonomy is maybe not a good thing for initial interview. Maybe you can look like someone who is not a team player, probably egoistic, or has radical ideas which are too risky for serious business etc...