Fellow ranters I have a question.

Do any of you have experience of going from a consultant job to working as a developer for a product company, where the thing you're developing is the actual product and not just some side thing (like a infrastructure company having a website for example).

If so, how did the experiences differ from one another?

I'm considering switching positions to a SaaS company and I'm just wondering how much of all the consultant based BS that I'm constantly stressing over will be erased if I go there.

My biggest gripes about work in my few years of developing have been the lack of team work, really ill formed requirements, low knowledge of the codebase among coworkers and just badly written code bases.

I wonder how much of this stuff is just the nature of the work and how much could be traced back to developers pushing out shitty stuff due to hourly billing, people leaving several times a year.

I believe the 4 gripes you have are always there in every company. I don't really think it's possible to avoid although literally everyone claims to have the solution - I've strangely never seen it.

If you have a team of 6 developers they're gonna all code with different goals, ideals & methodologies: Each person will think the other 5 are the most clueless retards ever to touch a keyboard and definitely never talk to them unless to diss each other's work. And there's a massive incentive to change jobs fast I don't see how you can blame people for that

I think real happiness can only come when you redefine coding skill as the ability to read/analyze/understand other people's apparent undocumented untested slow insecure unreadable spaghetti in whatever paradigm you hate most and pride yourself on that

OR by becoming a 1 person team

@ArtOfBBQ I think that's a fair assumption. I think my hope is that a company, who's product is what is actually being coded, would put in greater effort into making a stable and workable environment for developers. As in, greater than a consulting company who's main goal is to make sure that they can squeeze money out of you by the hour, no matter how soul crushing the work you do is.

I see what you're saying. I used to think exactly the same way but now I'd be more careful. I believe a company doesn't really think or try to do anything, it's just a collection of irrational people pursuing their own goals.

Behavior that doesn't help the company at all or even actively burns money is not unusual, it's par for the course everywhere. You might waste a bunch of time and resources to help your boss look good to a bigger boss with impressive nonsense, or destroy a coworker's reputation to further your own chance or promotion. Doing something like going a little slower to make your code readable / stable / maintainable is great for the company but fairly unlikely to help you much. Even if you actively try to be truly productive your managers and executives may fool you into nonsensical directions

So basically I think going into a job with expectations that your company will help you when mutually beneficial
is a recipe for depression.

Jesus I sound like a doomsday preacher sorry :(

Hah! No it’s fine, I think I’ve just managed to get myself into a lot of bad projects in my career and I get a little bummed out at the thought of not being able to find myself in a project where the codebase is ok, the development process is also part maintaining and refactoring for programmer happiness. I also feel like there’s a pretty significant turnover rate in consulting projects so when you do stumble upon something that seems impossible to fix you can’t really find anyone with more than 9 months experience that can help you.

Yeah definitely. Isn't the turnover rate really high for programmers also though?

I wish I could be more positive I just really don't think those problems are going away

What if you just went solo for a while? Try to make a little side hustle for yourself and eventually your 'dealing with other people's bs'-batteries will be fully recharged. You obviously have a good skill stack and experience so it would be doable