My life as a veteran front-end developer in web agencies

I have spent the last 12 years of my life bouncing from web agency to web agency. Within each, there was always something that bothered me:

1) The one web agency that head-hunted me. A novel experience, but this WAS the year 2000, after all. This agency's boss was a bald-headed, Napoleon-complex-suffering dilettante who, while wearing the right clothes (suit & tie) acted like an insufferable, petulant baby.

2) The company who had put all its eggs in the Java basket, as the country I was living in at the time was riding high on the "It must be Java!!!" wave. A place in central Europe, in case you're wondering.

3) The hilariously misguided company that bet all on a hopelessly outdated technology called WiTango. Curiously enough, even though nobody wanted to admit the dismal failure at the time, this company gave me the most pleasure, and the most friendships.

4) Companies too many to number who had been set on a course of technological failure long before I got there, ostensibly with the best of intentions, but with a stubborn mindset of "Can't change course now! KEEP ON ROWING, MEN!" that, in hindsight, was very lamentable.

Throughout my so-called career, I have joined companies that don't care about their underlying technology, that don't care about sustainability of their systems, and are ultimately amateurs without even knowing.

I quite likely come across as a know-it-all to my reader, but let's be honest. To the readers in the crowd that have been in similar situations: How many times have you applied for a job at web agencies that, to the outsider looking in, appear to be highly professional and well-running machines, but as soon as you peel back that thin veneer of apparent professionalism, they turn out to be relying on a hodge-podge of glued-together, its-a-miracle-this-stuff-still-works systems, processes, and a general sense of constant relief among the employees that paying clients haven't gotten wind of just how bad said circumstances are, that they're still paying bills, and thus the wages are guaranteed for at least another month?

That has been my experience, in a nutshell, of my career as a front-end developer in web agencies over the last 10 years+. Amateurism reigns supreme, but as long as you have fog-horn-voiced salespeople, and client-facing project managers who can lie through their teeth about project statuses, domain experience and sustainability of the procedures employed, you will be able to pay your bills.