The first couple years of my career were relatively normal. Full-time software development work involving teams, not always local or in-house teams, but I had at least a couple of other engineers to work with. After 2015 work was sparse. I couldn't catch a break most of the time with interviews and had to settle for solo freelance work to tide me over. It helps fill a few holes in unemployment, though.

However, I am always applying to full-time jobs, and want to know what to expect going back to work with a team of developers.

My past team experiences:

There was no unit testing and engineers weren't really expected to own their testing. The philosophy in every workplace I've been was "that's what manual QA is for". I hear manual QA testing is on the decline- is this true?

Code commits are like throwing an update over a wall and let the lead developer worry about it. You submit a PR and lead reviews your code. No automated CI as far as I know.

In fact I don't recall anything that was heavily automated. There was not a lot of big oversight with the dev process as everyone above senior or lead level was completely non-technical.

When off-shore devs were involved it was usually handled poorly. A miss in communication could mean losing a day of work because one overseas dev might accidentally un-do the merge by the time we step into work in the morning.