My single tip is: look for Product companies, not Service/Project companies.
This means looking for companies who build and maintain a product, SaaS or not, which they offer to customers, and avoid all sorts of consulting, offshoring, nearshoring, whatevershoring third-parties.
Project/Service companies draw little value from engineer familiarity with the systems they work on. Contracts and projects come and go, and everyone needs to learn new systems, processes, and technologies all the time. Experienced people end up as Project managers because that's the only path to career growth.
Product companies, on the other hand, suffer a lot from engineering turn-over, since they have this one complex system they need to babysit forever, and ever time someone leaves, the accumulated knowledge built on that person leaves with them (likely to a competitor who really benefits from that knowledge as well).
As someone who has worked at a "Project/Service" company for way too long, I wholeheartedly agree. It's a horrible way to build software and will drain your soul. Good software is both much more expensive and much more valuable than most people realize, and one contract or client is never enough to give it the attention it deserves. Your clients will wonder why your $200k custom software doesn't work like Excel / PowerBI / some other product with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. It will wear on you that you simply can't give your software the love it deserves solely on the tab of one single client.
This means looking for companies who build and maintain a product, SaaS or not, which they offer to customers, and avoid all sorts of consulting, offshoring, nearshoring, whatevershoring third-parties.
Project/Service companies draw little value from engineer familiarity with the systems they work on. Contracts and projects come and go, and everyone needs to learn new systems, processes, and technologies all the time. Experienced people end up as Project managers because that's the only path to career growth.
Product companies, on the other hand, suffer a lot from engineering turn-over, since they have this one complex system they need to babysit forever, and ever time someone leaves, the accumulated knowledge built on that person leaves with them (likely to a competitor who really benefits from that knowledge as well).