What's your environment like?

ixalmida

I love being a web developer! It appeals to me from both a creative and a logical perspective. I sincerely hope to continue in this career path for a good long time.

That said...I've only been doing web development for a few years and only in one environment where I am THE developer. I'm left wondering what other environments are like. Would anyone care to describe their development environment?

Here's mine:

Job requirements: Until recently, I was required to do I.T. support as the majority of my job while maintaining and adding to an existing site. Since a new site is being added that will generate revenue, I have become a full-time developer.
Colleagues: There are no other developers in my company, nor really a good understanding of how development should work. This often leads to unrealistic expectations.
Professionalism: My current project was an *attempt to do things right, but has been mostly derailed due to insufficient planning time.
Expectations: As the only developer, I am under intense pressure to perform.
Timing: My entire current project (a customer service portal) is due to be released in a little over a week (just four months after the bare metal build) and it is far from finished.
Job Security: My current project has plans that extend well into 2012 - and since I'm the only developer, I'm feeling pretty safe right now.

I would love to hear about your environment just so I know what is out there. Do you work for a big company? Do you have beaurocratic hurdles to jump before anything gets done? Do you do contract work out of your home? Are you part of a development team?

Thanks in advance for sharing!

bpat1434

Job Requirements
[indent]Develop and estimate new projects. Maintain current client's sites. Train and evaluate new employees performance[/indent]

Colleagues
[indent]We have 5 developers (including myself), one designer, one project management specialist, 3 VPs, 2 owners (one is a VP, the other the Pres.) and a secretary.[/indent]

Professionalism
[indent]We don't really have a dress-code, except nothing offensive. We do require you to try to comment your code, format it in a specific way, and put it in subversion.[/indent]

Expectations
[indent]Develop to the define goals, finish on or under time.[/indent]

Timing
[indent]We estimate a project, and then after we reach the estimation date, we typically do an internal walk through, then show it to the client. We fix bugs as we need, then when it's time to go live, we put it live through an SVN checkout.[/indent]

Job Security
[indent]We have a VP of sales who keeps projects coming in. Our Pres. also sells sites. We do a lot of work for large corporations, so we are relatively sitting okay for now.[/indent]

ixalmida

Wow! Sounds like a cozy environment. I bet it is nice to have other developers to consult with. We tried to hire a designer consultant at the beginning of my current project because I didn't want to be bothered with the layout or graphics - I had enough on my plate to start with.

About a month before deadline, the big bosses decided they didn't like her design. The designer got offended and decided she was done. She delivered one graphic (a horizontal navbar that I could have made myself in a few minutes), for which we paid her $1,500. I ended up having to do the layout and all the graphics myself.

The worst of it was that we spent about 2 weeks interviewing designers. I could have used that time to do the design and been 2 weeks ahead in my development.