I don't work for a game company, but yeah, I agree that the crunch time doesn't work well. I've read articles about the correlation between that kind of crunch

I don't work for a game company, but yeah, I agree that the crunch time doesn't work well. I've read articles about the correlation between that kind of crunch time programming, and the general maturity of the artform. That is, the guys (I remember the industry being dominated by males) who raise a family and enter that stage of their life end up dropping out of the gaming industry. Thus, games tend to be made by guys who haven't had that life experience, willing to go into crunch mode, etc. I brought it up though as an example of pacing. I'm trying to discern whether it is the pacing itself, or whether it is the programming jobs you have tried have been with organizations that have a lot of red tape, or whether it is simply the engineering discipline that you prefer not to participate in. As for the Internet-era companies, the fast iteration is something you tend to see more in startups rather than startups that have matured into big business. Iteration for the sake of iteration itself doesn't work very well either (John Boyd "fighter pilot agility" vs. Agile Manifesto). It's also where devops is coming out from, and proliferating back into mainstream IT.