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Products have lifecycles. One of the states is the milking state, where you minimize investment in that product to maximize profit (put another way, the increme

Products have lifecycles. One of the states is the milking state, where you minimize investment in that product to maximize profit (put another way, the incremental value of new work is less than or equal to zero). Anybody would be stupid to continue dumping money in those. The problem is that state occurs right before product death. If you aren't investing that milk money somewhere new, your company is in a death spiral, regardless of how much money there is coming in today. So if your company is only milking and not investing, then, yes, leave, immediately. Personally, I've not seen that happen often, but I have seen it.

davedx 14y ago
Textbook definition of the last company I worked at. A gigantic monolithic struts1 Asset Management product with 19k LOC in some of its JSP files. All they ever did with it was pitch it to companies, get us some minor web services to add to it and move on to the next company. I couldn't even persuade them to use Agile or start to use Unit Testing, let alone start something new. When I suggested in some brief down time that we make something new, I was actually laughed at by the senior sales guy/project manager who was my boss. God I hated that place so much. So glad I work somewhere that actually builds things and has a decent business strategy.
vonmoltke 14y ago
I'd leave also if the company's definition of "investing" is limited to some combination of polishing, enhancing, or repackaging the same milk money projects repeatedly. Its almost as dangerous as just sticking to the milk money projects (unless your company is a government contractor).
- jebblue 14y ago
  So engineers (coders) at IBM, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, Wal-Mart, etc. should give up their "dangerous" jobs and seek out startups?
  - davedx 14y ago
    Oh, come on, are you serious? IBM - one of the biggest R&D IT companies in the history of computing. Microsoft - invented Windows, the XBox, Visual Studio, Silverlight, C#, the list is endless. Apple - inventing radically new consumer products every other year. Those examples are not what he was talking about at all.
    - jebblue 14y ago
      If you think my examples are not valid then provide some you think are representative of what he was talking about.

davedx 14y ago

Textbook definition of the last company I worked at. A gigantic monolithic struts1 Asset Management product with 19k LOC in some of its JSP files. All they ever did with it was pitch it to companies, get us some minor web services to add to it and move on to the next company. I couldn't even persuade them to use Agile or start to use Unit Testing, let alone start something new. When I suggested in some brief down time that we make something new, I was actually laughed at by the senior sales guy/project manager who was my boss. God I hated that place so much. So glad I work somewhere that actually builds things and has a decent business strategy.

vonmoltke 14y ago

I'd leave also if the company's definition of "investing" is limited to some combination of polishing, enhancing, or repackaging the same milk money projects repeatedly. Its almost as dangerous as just sticking to the milk money projects (unless your company is a government contractor).

jebblue 14y ago
So engineers (coders) at IBM, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, Wal-Mart, etc. should give up their "dangerous" jobs and seek out startups?
- davedx 14y ago
  Oh, come on, are you serious? IBM - one of the biggest R&D IT companies in the history of computing. Microsoft - invented Windows, the XBox, Visual Studio, Silverlight, C#, the list is endless. Apple - inventing radically new consumer products every other year. Those examples are not what he was talking about at all.
  - jebblue 14y ago
    If you think my examples are not valid then provide some you think are representative of what he was talking about.