I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested.
But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.
How do you come up with a good time estimate? If you are a typical employee, there is a good chance that your job revolves not around day to day mundane tasks. There may be some of that, but there is a good chance that it revolves around completing projects. Yes, project oriented work is challenging and rewarding, but often done very poorly.
Not that your work is bad, its the management of the project that we suck at.
I always laugh when ever someone has a commercial that states moving at the speed of business. I’ve seen the speed of business and its damn slow!
In a previous life, way back when we were first developing our appliances, we shipped on Sun v100 servers. They were cheap boxes that packed quite a bit of power under the hood. Sun had on their site that servers shipped within 3-5 business days.
There are 3 basic rules to software programming. Most people don’t know them. Or if they do, they probably don’t know how to properly articulate them. So I’m going to spell out the 3 rules for you. This was talked about a lot at my last job early on when dealing with problems and support issues. Just about everything came back to one of these 3 rules, and unfortunately, rule 3 was more popular than even we believed.
If you are sick to the point where you are praying to the porcelain throne, you are too sick to be on call. Make sure you get that changed.