5 ms·

I've worked at 3 different companies over the past 13 years (1 large, 1 small, now 1 medium in size) and in all cases a full product development cycle is on the

by bradfa 8y ago

I've worked at 3 different companies over the past 13 years (1 large, 1 small, now 1 medium in size) and in all cases a full product development cycle is on the order of 1-3 years at all of them for both hardware and software. I've shipped tons of stuff. If you're finding "a lot of jobs" which don't involve actually shipping product to customers, maybe you're looking at the wrong kinds of companies or the wrong kind of industry?

SlightRespect 8y ago
Some cities are dominated by insurance/banking/healthcare companies. Their IT needs are quite different than the consumer software space. It's more like a salesguy just landed a big fish and the big fish is making these demands to close the deal, so bolt on some new functionality to your existing platform. Ad nauseum.
lovich 8y ago
You are correct, I am in the wrong shops. I am in enterprise shops mostly and the one shop where we were releasing something every week or two was a 5 man engineering team that was left alone by the main company until we started making good money, at which point the company started interfering and we stopped shipping. In the enterprise jobs I have more projects under my belt that were completed and never released versus released products. Every time it's been the result of either a low level executive losing a political battle and the project being shelved to rearrange resources or a company with little to no competition where executives didn't seem to care much about a million wasted here or there. One project I was on wasted over a million in development costs with the 5 product owners and me as the single dev because the executive who needed to sign off on the completed project didn't like the background color and insisted we started over at the requirements phase because "What else might we have gotten wrong?" Startups seem more fun/invigorating but the stability and pay haven't been there when I looked so I just stick at the enterprise jobs doing what I can and saving money aggressively to be financially independent and start working at jobs that I want to work out

by bradfa 8y ago

SlightRespect 8y ago

Some cities are dominated by insurance/banking/healthcare companies. Their IT needs are quite different than the consumer software space. It's more like a salesguy just landed a big fish and the big fish is making these demands to close the deal, so bolt on some new functionality to your existing platform. Ad nauseum.

lovich 8y ago

You are correct, I am in the wrong shops. I am in enterprise shops mostly and the one shop where we were releasing something every week or two was a 5 man engineering team that was left alone by the main company until we started making good money, at which point the company started interfering and we stopped shipping. In the enterprise jobs I have more projects under my belt that were completed and never released versus released products. Every time it's been the result of either a low level executive losing a political battle and the project being shelved to rearrange resources or a company with little to no competition where executives didn't seem to care much about a million wasted here or there. One project I was on wasted over a million in development costs with the 5 product owners and me as the single dev because the executive who needed to sign off on the completed project didn't like the background color and insisted we started over at the requirements phase because "What else might we have gotten wrong?" Startups seem more fun/invigorating but the stability and pay haven't been there when I looked so I just stick at the enterprise jobs doing what I can and saving money aggressively to be financially independent and start working at jobs that I want to work out