"The product did not languish. Things still got done. Turns out clients, for the most part, could not care less how hard and fast we worked. Having good informa

"The product did not languish. Things still got done. Turns out clients, for the most part, could not care less how hard and fast we worked. Having good information for when something would be complete was sufficient. Sometimes better because we were not breaking ourselves trying to impress them with impossible deadlines that we would sometimes miss. Good information was better than fast information." This. After years of working at shops where putting out fires was the norm I took a position with a company that handles their client deliverables in the manner you describe. For the first six months I was constantly jumpy, waiting for crunch time to hit and slinking home at 5:00pm feeling vaguely guilty that I was done for the day. I just couldn't famthom how we could be working on all of the large project initiatives in our pipeline with no screaming clients and no marathon code sprints. After a year in a sane environment it'd take more than six figures to get me to go back to the soul-eating grind that is so typical in small dev shops.