Well, let me tell you my story. The first company I worked in was developing and selling a ERP to several middle-sized companies- we had about 30/ 40 clients, w

Well, let me tell you my story. The first company I worked in was developing and selling a ERP to several middle-sized companies- we had about 30/ 40 clients, with maybe half of them requesting customizations and new procedures to be added on a regular basis. We were just three developers, and the ERP was written in C. Not even a SQL database, the access to the DB was based on cursors. Sounds like a nightmare, right? And yet, that has definitely been the most productive environment I've ever worked in. The secret was a well tested and never changing base library and hyper-specialized developers but especially no deviation whatsoever from the standards ("can we have that string in blue?" "no, not possible, sorry"), a very controlled environment to run on and strictly defined use cases.