College is not where you find a career. College is where you have fun and drink beer

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by Pete Zicato

You can fight the good fight with swords held high. But I'd bet you still won't win. Mainly because you are fighting corporate culture, not department culture.

What's much easier is to find a company with the right corporate culture.

And the easiest way to do that is to find a company where software is a profit center, not a cost center. When the software you work on makes the company money. It is much easier to push them to do the right thing.

I also personally believe that life is much better at a midsize privately owned company. You won't get stock options. But you also won't get whipsawed by quarterly reports.

You might also want to look at the Spolsky Employer test. Spolsky is full of himself. But he is really introspective about the software development process and practices what he preaches. He doesn't post often these days. But if you haven't read them. Go back and read his articles that sound interesting.

I'm very familiar with Spolsky's work, and have been reading it since the early days. For the last decade, I've been working my way into better and better employers from that perspective. The problem is it's hard to accurately judge a company until you're actually in the door, and sometimes it takes months of looking at things to realize you've been sold a story.

I will always fight the good fight, but when it becomes clear that the company doesn't want to I move on. Probably a reason I've switched jobs almost every year since 2006. People will always tell you they are fighting the good fight, whether they are or not. They will tell you "we are trying", even when they aren't even willing to budge their process in that direction.

Most of my jobs have been for small-medium sized companies. And the vast majority of the time has been in ~50 person companies. Couple of short stints for the government too, which will not be repeated unless out of dire need.

I definitely need to be more critical in the hiring phase. But I'm kind of tired of switching jobs, looking for somewhere that doesn't drive me to impotent nerd-rages. My next move will likely be to freelance/consult or start my own company and nurture the culture I want.

(This thread has drifted completely into our nerdy IT career thoughts. Hope nobody is too offended.)