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• Is it common to only pay developers for the time they said a project would take?

  - by BAM

  I work at a small startup (<10 people), and I was recently assigned (along with one other developer) to a relatively small project. The project involved moving an existing iOS app to Android. The client told us they had built the app for iOS in 300 man-hours. Not knowing at the time that this figure was completely false, we naively and optimistically assumed that if they could build the app from scratch in that amount of time, we could easily "port" it in a similar amount of time. Therefore, we drafted up a fixed-price contract based on 350 man-hours, with a 5 week deadline. (We are well aware now of how big of a mistake this was... Never let the client tell you how long it's going to take!) Anyway, by week 4 we had already surpassed our 350 hours, and we estimated that there were at least 2 more weeks left on the project. We were told to continue working, but that the company could not afford to pay out on overdue projects anymore. I thought this just meant "be more careful about estimates in the future". However a few weeks later, the company president informed us that we would not be getting paid for any time past 350 man-hours. We argued over the issue for almost an hour. He claimed, however, that this is standard practice for many organizations, and that I was unreasonable for making a big deal out of it. So is this really a common thing, or am I justified in being upset about it? Thanks in advance for any advice!

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• Handle complexity in large software projects

  - by Oliver Vogel

  I am a lead developer in a larger software projects. From time to time its getting hard to handle the complexity within this project. E. g. Have the whole big picture in mind all the time Keeping track of the teammates work results Doing Code Reviews Supply management with information etc. Are there best practices/ time management techniques to handle these tasks? Are there any tools to support you having an overview?

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• How to suggest changes as a recently-hired employee ?

  - by ereOn

  Hi, I was recently hired in a big company (thousands of people, to give an idea of the size). They said they hired me because of my rigor and because I was, despite my youngness (i'm 25), experienced as a C/C++ programer. Now that I'm in, I can see that the whole system is old and often uses obsolete technologies. There is no naming convention (files, functions, variables, ...), they don't use Version Control, don't use exceptions or polymorphism and it seems like almost everybody lost his passion (some of them are only 30 years old). I'd like to suggest somes changes but i don't want to be "the new guy that wants to change everything just because he doesn't want to fit in". I tried to "fit in", but actually, It takes me one week to do what I would do in one afternoon, just because of the poor tools we're forced to use. A lot my collegues never look at the new "things" and techniques that people use nowadays. It's like they just given up. The situation is really frustrating. Have you ever been in a similar situation and, if so, what advices would you give me ? Is there a subtle way of changing things without becoming the black sheep here ? Or should I just give up my passion and energy as well ? Thank you. Updates Just in case (if anyone cares): following your precious advices I was able to suggest changes and am now in charge of the team that must create and deploy Subversion :D Thanks to all of you !

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• Is there industry demand for developers who have no GUI experience?

  - by James Jeffery

  Is there still demand for developers who crate software without GUI's in the industry? Are jobs still in demand? I only ask because I write a lot of software for myself in C. I mainly use FreeBSD without a GUI. My software is for data mining, automation and marketing purposes most of the time as this is the field I work in. I find that a GUI is not needed and I feel comfortable working within a console. I've never worked for a company as a programmer, but in the industry do you have dedicated programmers who work exclusively on the GUI's and other who write the logic?

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• I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

  - by TiredProgrammer

  I have just recently started my career as a web developer for a medium sized company. As soon as I started I got the task of expanding an existing application (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure) So after I had successfully extended this application with the requested functionality, they gave me the task to fully maintain the application. This was of course not a problem, or so I thought. But then I got to hear I wasn't allowed to improve the existing code and to only focus on bug fixes when a bug gets reported. From then on I have had 3 more projects just like the above, that I now also have to maintain. And I got 4 projects where I was allowed to create the application from scratch, and I have to maintain those as well. At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. They expect me to handle these mails directly while also working on 2 other new projects (and there are already 5 more projects lined up after those). The sad thing is I have yet to receive a bug report on anything that I have coded myself, for that I have only received the occasional lets do things 180 degrees different change requests. Anyway, is this normal? In my opinion I'm doing the work equivalent of a whole team of developers. Was I an idiot when I initially expected things to be different? I guess this post has turned into a big rant, but please tell me that this is not the same for every developer. P.S. My salary is almost equal if not lower then that of a cashier at a supermarket.

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• Update live USB distro?

  - by qubex

  I have Lubuntu 14.04 (and Ubuntu 14.04) on a pair of USB disks created by writing the img files to USB using dd on Mac OS X. Unfortunately these systems both have some known bugs (that have since been corrected) and lack certain important drivers for my system (which I have located online). How can I make the USB disks writable and how do I update the distribution upon them as one may do for a locally-installed system? And if I later proceed to install from these USB sticks onto a hard-drive, will they ‘carry’ the package and driver updates with them or will I have to start from scratch again? (I seem to remember from my ancient Windows XP days that such procedures were referred to as ’slipstreaming’ or somesuch on that side of the fence.) (No, I did not create a persistence partition when I created the sticks, because from Mac clearly that isn’t an option. And anyway, as I imperfectly understand it, the persistence partition is for user files and not for the modification of the system.)

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• What are some good online tech talks?

  - by Avi

  We have a weekly tech talk at work, where we try to either have one of the developers present some subject, or watch a video or other presentation. The subjects can be anything related to software development (or anything else, if it is particularly interesting), but we have tended recently to focus on software development methodology, such as unit testing, and technologies, such as NoSQL. What are some good online presentations to watch, especially those related to software development?

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• Are they asking too much of me?

  - by Tesserex

  Or am I just whining? Background: I work for a "startup," which I put in air quotes because the company has been around for 4 years. We have about 40 employees in three offices, 9 here plus some part time. We have a good amount of investment and bring in about 75% of what we spend (so not profitable just yet.) Standard work week is supposed to be about 60 hours, but they justify that as we have to be online when our international (Taiwan and Vietnam) offices are awake. When I started the job 6 months ago, I spent about a month prototyping an iphone app and did really well on my own. They also found out about my facebook applications and how many users they got. Putting 2 and 2 together (and winding up at -7) they realized 1. I'm independent and innovative (because I was able to use stackoverflow to answer my iOS questions instead of bugging my superiors) and 2. I must have an eye for marketing (since my fb apps grew totally organically without me doing any advertising), and assigned me to a project optimizing adwords campaigns. Today I got reviewed, and then chewed out, by our CEO for not totally rocking this project. Now I thought I was doing ok, but the CEO said the project is stagnant and they're expecting more from me. But since it's a startup, they play loose with job roles and I've had plenty of other things to do in the past three months. Every time I ask what's most important, I get conflicting responses depending who I ask, and the end result is that almost everything has equal priority - high. I could go on about how I don't think adwords is worthwhile for us since our profit margin is so slim, and how we should be trying to improve our website first, but that's not the point. I also have explained to the office director (who originally assigned me the project, not the CEO) that I don't actually know anything about marketing, I'm just a decent programmer, but they think my general smarts will prove capable of tackling this challenge. The CEO also clarified that he wants a more technical and algorithmic approach to the problem. So is there something I can do to address this? Combined with my existing and confusing workload, should I be raising an issue? Or should I do the grown up thing and give it my all, asking for help when I need it and hoping for the best? Sorry if this is very rant-ish.

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• Anyone code at a treadmill desk? [closed]

  - by Sequenzia

  have been thinking about getting a treadmill desk for awhile now but I just don't know if it is possible to code at one. I can see doing a normal computer job while walking very slow but I just don't know if you can write code do it. Like a lot of people I could stand to lose weight and I am just not in shape anymore. I sit at my computer for at least 12 hours a day and then I am on my laptop for a few more hours. I need to do something to help my health. I also have been seeing a lot of reports about the long term health issues related to desk jobs. Like this. Before I drop a few hundred dollars on a new desk I am wondering if anyone has tried a treadmill desk and if so which one?

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• Should I avoid or embrace asking questions of other developers on the job?

  - by T.K.

  As a CS undergraduate, the people around me are either learning or are paid to teach me, but as a software developer, the people around me have tasks of their own. They aren't paid to teach me, and conversely, I am paid to contribute. When I first started working as a software developer co-op, I was introduced to a huge code base written in a language I had never used before. I had plenty of questions, but didn't want to bother my co-workers with all of them - it wasted their time and hurt my pride. Instead, I spent a lot of time bouncing between IDE and browser, trying to make sense of what had already been written and differentiate between expected behavior and symptoms of bugs. I'd ask my co-workers when I felt that the root of my lack of understanding was an in-house concept that I wouldn't find on the internet, but aside from that, I tried to confine my questions to lunch hours. Naturally, there were occasions where I wasted time trying to understand something in code on the internet that had, at its heart, an in-house concept, but overall, I felt I was productive enough during my first semester, contributing about as much as one could expect and gaining a pretty decent understanding of large parts of the product. I was wondering what senior developers felt about that mindset. Should new developers ask more questions to get to speed faster, or should they do their own research for themselves? I see benefits to both mindsets, and anticipate a large variety of responses, but I figure new developers might appreciate your answers without thinking to ask this question.

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• Software Manager who makes developers do Project Management

  - by hdman

  I'm a software developer working in an embedded systems company. We have a Project Manager, who takes care of the overall project schedule (including electrical, quality, software and manufacturing) hence his software schedule is very brief. We also have a Software Manager, who's my boss. He makes me write and maintain the software schedule, design documents (high and low level design), SRS, change management, verification plans and reports, release management, reviews, and ofcourse the software. We only have one Test Engineer for the whole software team (10 members), and at any given time, there are a couple of projects going on. I'm spending 80% of my time making these documents. My boss comes from a Process background, and believes what we need is better documentation to improve software: (1) He considers the design to be paramount, coding is "just writing the design down", it shouldn't take too long, and "all the code should be written before the hardware is ready". (2) Doesn't understand the difference between a Central & Distributed Version control, even after we told him its easier to collaborate with a distributed model. (3) Doesn't understand code, and wants to understand every bug and its proposed solution. (4) Believes verification should be done by developer, and validation by the Tester. Thing is though, our verification only checks if implementation is correct (we don't write unit tests, its never considered in the schedule), and validation is black box testing, so the units tests are missing. I'm really confused. (1) Am I responsible for maintaining all these documents? It makes me feel like I'm doing the Software Project Management, in essence. (2) I don't really like creating documents, I want to solve problems and write code. In my experience, creating design documents only helps to an extent, its never the solution to better or faster code. (3) I feel the boss doesn't really care about making better products, but only about being a good manager in the eyes of the management. What can I do?

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• What can I do to encourage teams to lighten up? [closed]

  - by Rahul

  I work with a geographically distributed team (different timezones) with people from various cultures and background. Some of us have never met each other in person but we communicate with each other over phone, chat and email almost on an hourly basis. Most of our meetings and discussions are dead serious and boring. What's worse, any attempt at humor is not very well received because of cultural differences. I feel that we are all taking our work a bit too seriously. We don't shy away from painful arguments, nasty emails and heated discussions when things go wrong but never attempt to develop camaraderie or friendships in better times. I would like to know your experiences with such situations and what, if anything, did you do to lighten things up at workplace.

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• If most of team can't follow the architecture, what do you do?

  - by Chris

  Hi all, I'm working on a greenfields project with two other developers. We're all contractors, and myself and one other just started working on the project while the orginal one has been doing most of the basic framework coding. In the past month, my fellow programmer and I have been just frustrated by the design descisions done by our co-worker. Here's a little background information: The application at face value appeared to be your standard n-layered web application using C# on the 3.5 framework. We have a data layer, business layer and a web interface. But as we got deeper into the project we found some very interesting things that have caused us some troubles. There is a custom data access sqlHelper type base which only accepts dictionary key/valued entries and returns only data tables. There are no entity objects, but there are some massive objects which do everything and then are tossed into session for persitance. The general idea is that the pages (.aspx) don't do anything, while the controls (.ascx) do everything. The general flow is that a client clicks on a button, which goes to a user control base which passes a process request to the 'BLL' class which goes to the page processor, which then goes to a getControlProcessor, which at last actually processes the request. The request itself is made up of a dictionary which is passing a string valued method name, stored procedure name, a control name and possibly a value. All switching of the processing is done by comparing the string values of the control names and method names. Pages are linked together via a common header control that uses a combination of javascript and tables to create a hyperlink effect. And as I found out yesterday, a simple hyperlink between one page and another does not work because of the need to have quite a bit of information in session to determine which control to display on a page. My fellow programmer and I both believe that this is a strange and uncommon approach to web application development. Both of us have been in this business for over five years and neither of us have seen this approach. My question is this, how would we approach our co-worker and voice our concerns and what should we do if he does not want to accept the criteic? We both do not want to insult the work that has been done, but feel that going forward will create a nightmare for development. Thanks for your comments.

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• In which fields does quality of the software product matter as much as the completion time?

  - by Nav

  Someone told me that if the software product meets clients expectations, it is good quality. But I've worked with Interaction Designers (the same kind of people who made Gmail's interface and usability so cool!), and I've loved working with them because even though they came up with hundreds of changes in requirements, and emphasised on many many subtle details, when the software was complete, I could look at the product and say WOW! The current place I work, the only thing that matters is completing the project on time. As long as it works and as long as the client says it's ok, nobody bothers to improve it. I'm not talking about gold-plating, but I believe that for a programmer to enjoy his (well, maybe her too ;) ) job, they should be able to proudly say that "Hey, I made that software" and that comes only when the product is of good quality. Apart from your opinions on this, I'd also like to know which fields (Eg. Aerospace, Finance etc.) could I find companies (or you could mention the company name) where the quality of a product is as important as completing the project on time?

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• What should I do if I have a genius team lead which does not share? [on hold]

  - by ???

  Good evening, I got some uncertainties and need some advise or any experiences 'story' from you guys. The question is quite straight forward but I gonna clarify somethings in details. My Background I just graduated from my university 6 months ago. Being offer from 4 companies after I go through some interviews. Now I'm working on a banking services company, everything is consider 'ok' except I had a genius team lead which does not share enough information to let me do a task/work. Situation faced In my team, there is a "ask to know" culture. When you are going to guess or try some methods to solve the problems, I need to ask to make sure I do not do something stupid and when I asked my team lead...There're only 2 situations, 1st: I being given a strange look like: "do you know what are you do/said just now? Just follow the standards, I do not care!" (Felt humiliated) 2nd: Get the answer but my team lead suddenly in bad moods, I think thats I have waste her time for some simple questions which I do not know. Add-Ons My team lead is really a clever and a smart senior developers/programmers, sometimes she will brief through the tasks while sometimes not. Depend on her moods. There certain times I am look-down on myself and felt want to quit/resign. I'm still under-probation and had joined this company for around 4 months. I felt like I do not have the innovation skills which I used to had in university and lose my self-confidence when communicate to others.

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• How to get out of supporting deadend sales pitches?

  - by JoseK

  As part of being a programmer, you often are asked to provide estimates/ make slideware / do technical demos for Sales teams to present to end-clients. Sometimes we go along for the 'technical' discussions or 'strategic capability planning' or some similar mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes, you kind of know which ones are totally going to fail and are not worth pursuing but the Sales guys present fake optimism and extract 'few more slides' out of you or the 'last conference call'. These don't lead to anywhere and are just a waste of time from other tasks for the week. My question is how do you get out of these situations without coming across as non-cooperative. Updated after Kate Gregory's answer: The problem is related to projects we know are doomed (from the technical feedback we've received) But Sales ain't convinced since they've just had a call higher up the management chain - so it's definitely going ahead !

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• During interviews, how do I gauge a company's respect for my position?

  - by Bluu

  I'm a web developer who previously joined a software company not knowing their value and respect went to big data analysis, not their website. Sure, they needed a public-facing website, but I eventually found that the most exciting, valued projects there went to data teams. Realizing this, members of the web team were picked off and switched teams, making it hard for those left behind to keep up the work load, and making us look bad. At times it seemed the company culture sneered at us, wondering, "What does that team even do here?" A friend of mine had the opposite problem at another software company. All he wanted to do was crunch big numbers. However he complained that the rest of the company wouldn't shut up about developing the usability of their website. Meanwhile his analytics team languished. I've also heard of salespeople getting love at a company, while engineering as a whole is undervalued, or vice versa. As for my story, if I could have known the company was like that, I might have avoided the job in the first place. So, before I join a new company, how do I gauge its actual respect for my programming role? For its other roles? I want to avoid companies that aren't serious about my particular focus in programming, or, perhaps bigger picture, companies that don't value everybody who works there. (Note I think gauging the company's attitude toward the basic needs of its programmers is covered by these related questions.)

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• what other bash variables are available during execution such as $USER that can assist on my script?

  - by semi-newbie

  This is related to question 19245, in that one of the responders answered the question in an awesome way, and very VERY clear to any newbie. Now here is a question that i can't seem to figure. i wrote a script for starting the vmware firefox plugin (don't worry. i gave that up and now run vBox VERY happily. i left vmware for my servers :) ) I needed to start the plugin as sudo, but i also needed to pass an argument (password) to it, that happen to be the same. So, if my password was Hello123, the command would be: sudo ./myscript.sh hi other Hello123 running from command line, the script would ask for my sudo password and then run. i wanted to capture THAT password and pass it as well. i also wanted to run graphically, so i tried gksudo, and there is an option -p that returns the password for variable assignment. well, that was a nightmare, because i would still get prompted for the original sudo: see below Find UserName vUser=$USER Find password (and hopefully enable sudo) vP=gksudo -p -D somedescriptiontext echo Execute command gksudo ./myscript.sh hi $vUser $vP and i still get prompted twice. so my question is tri-fold: is there a variable i can use for the password, just like there is one for user, $USER? is there a different way i should be assigning the value resulting of the command i have in $vP? i am wondering if executing the way i have it, does it in an uninitiated session and not the current one, since i am getting some addtl warning type errors on some variables blah blah i tried using Zenity to just capture the text, but then of course, i couldn't pass that value to sudo, so i could only use as a parameter, which puts me back in 2 prompts. Thanksssssssssss!

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• How do I change the keyboard layout to a non-standard one on a Live (USB) session?

  - by Agmenor

  I am running Ubuntu 13.04 in a Live (USB) session. My physical keyboard layout is called Bépo, it is the French language Dvorak method-based layout. I would like to change my input layout to this too. To do this, I tried booting in a French spoken session, then open the Keyboard Layout preferences app. Normally, to add a layout, you should click on the + sign and select your layout. However the list that appears is very short and does not contain what I want. On the contrary, on a persistent non-live installation, the choice of Bépo is present. This is also the case during an installation of Ubuntu. So I do I change the keyboard layout of my live session to the correct one?

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• How do I tell my boss he made the wrong choice? [migrated]

  - by SomeKittens

  Recently, our biggest product failed majorly because we'd only used outsourced labor to do it, and they never tested anything, etc. Finally, our CEO decided that the US team should learn the code and fix it up. (Not a total rewrite, but lots of formatting/style changes, refactoring, etc). However, he knows next to nothing about programming (thankfully, he admits it). He had been grooming me to take on the project manager position, but I had to go back to college. Now he gave it to another programmer who is naive and inexperienced. I don't feel the naive programmer will do nearly as well. The CEO's reasoning is that the naive programmer can work full time and I can only do part time, so the less senior programmer could put more work into it. How can I convince him that 15 hours of my time is worth more than the other guy's 40?

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• Blocked Sites at work (that aren't even bad)

  - by Mercfh

  So here recently, i've been using google to look up information for basically random programming things (i was just hired on a month or so ago). So here recently I was actually looking up some information about RAW_SOCKETS (but thats beside the point) Anyways some of the tutorials sites/explaining how to use them and explaining the protocol sites are actually blocked. (and our manager sent out an email saying that if u run into a site just to email her just in case). Now obviously...w/e sys admins probably see these 'blocked' sites in their reports. But should I be worried? I mean....I literally am not trying to be devious Im just trying to learn stuff. I guess programming websites are sometimes labeled as "hacking". sometimes blogs get labeled like that, but alot of the time blogs have USEFUL information. This apparently happens alot of my other co-workers and they don't even bother emailing our manager.....but should I be worried? Or has this happened to you guys before?

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• Where can work-at-home coders go to find other coders to real-time chat with and get support like they were on a large team at an established company?

  - by cypherblue

  I used to work in an office surrounded by a large team of programmers where we all used the same languages and had different expertises. Now that I am on my own forming a startup at home, my productivity is suffering because I miss having people I can talk to for specific help, inspiration and reality checks when working on a coding problem. I don't have access to business incubators or shared (co-working) office spaces for startups so I need to chat with people virtually. Where can I go for real-time chat with other programmers and developers (currently I'm looking for people developing for the web, javascript and python) for live debugging and problem-solving of the tasks I am working on? And what other resources can I use to get fellow programmer support?

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• If you had the power to remove one thing in your daily job, what would it be?

  - by Pierre 303

  With nearly 60 answers to this question it's highly likely that your answer has already been posted. Please don't post an answer unless you have something new to say This can be a particular task you find not very useful, a manager behavior, your canteen, some security rule you must comply to, tools they want you to use, commuting, schedules, a customer, a technical problem you encouter all the time, anything, ... please be creative ;) One answer per thing. Explain why. Please vote up on other answers if appropriate.

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• How do I dig myself out of this DEEP hole? [closed]

  - by user74847

  I may be a bit bias in the way i word this but any opinions and suggestions are welcome. I should start by saying i have a MSc in CS and a degree in new media +6 years expereince and im probably around a middleweight developer. I started a web development company with my friend from uni a year ago, there was a 4 month gap in the middle where i went miles away work on a big project. Ive since returned and picked up where we left off. A year on though i find im still staying up til 5am and getting up at 9 sometimes 2-3 days without sleep. While i was away i was working 9-5 and struggling to keep up with doing stuff for my clients 8 hours ahead, after work, so things stagnated. We currently have about 12 active projects, with one other part time developer and a full time freelancer who is dealing with one of our major projects. I am solely responsible for concurrently developing 2 big sites similar to gumtree in functionality, at the same time as about 5-6+ small WordPress based 5-10page sites. a lot of the content isnt in yet or the client is delaying so i chop and change project every other day which does my head in. Is it reasonable to expect myself to remember the intricate details of each project when i come back to it a week later? and remember the details of a task which hasnt been written down? my business partner seems to think so. or am i just forgetful? Im particularly bad at estimating timescales which doesnt help, added to that a lot of the technologies im am using are new to me (a magento site took weeks to theme rather than days and was full of bugs, even after 1000's of google searches and hours reading forums) im still trying to learn and find the best CMS for us to use and getting my head around the likes of Bootstrap and jquery, Cpanel / Linux (we just got a blank vps for me to set up with no experience) even installing an SSL certificate caused everyone's mail clients to go down which was more stress for me to sort out. I find the pressure of the workload and timescales and trying to learn this stuff so fast is beginning to turn me against my career path. The fact that i never seem to get anything done really winds up my business partner and iv come to associate him with the stress and pain of the whole situation especially when I get berated or a look that says "oh you retard" when I forget something. Even today i spent hours learning how a particular themeforest theme worked with wordpress and how i could twist it to work for our partiuclar needs, on the surface had done no work, that triggered a 30 minute tirade of anger and stress and questioning what i had done from my business partner. had i taken too long to work on that? shoudl i have done it in 2 hours instead of 6? i told him i would take 2 hours. i was wrong. I feel like im running myself into the ground. My sleeping pattern has got so bad that when im working im half asleep and making mistakes, my eyes are constantly purple underneath, i literally fall asleep at my desk, its affecting my social life too, ive not slept more than lightly for the last year and grind through impossible code puzzles in my half sleep wich keeps me awake, when im already exhausted. plus the work is rushed and buggy when it does get done so drags on into the next project. I also procrastinate quite badly, pacing the livingroom, looking out the window when Im alone for three days straight in the flat and start to get cabin fever which means i do even less work and the negative feedback loop continues. I get told im the only one with the problem when i say that i cant work from home any more, and examples of other freelancers get brought up. an office wouldnt bring any extra cash in to the company but im convinced having that moving more than 2 meters away from my bed to go to "work" would get me working, at the moment i feel guilty like i should be working 24-7. It is important that we do all this work to raise enough cash to get our business to the next level but every month still feels like a struggle to pay the rent (there is about £20K coming in by Jan) and i have to borrow money from friends often to buy food or get a taxi to a meeting, so it is vital the money keeps coming in. (im also 20 mins late for nearly all meetings but thats a different issue) have you experienced anything similar? how can i deal with the issues ive raised? is it realistic to develop 10 sites at once? how can i improve my relationship with my business partner? do you struggle to work at home? how do you deal with that? i think if i dont get my life on track by feb i will seriously consider giving it all up, but that seems like such a waste. any ideas!!? i need help! Thanks.

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• How can we unify business goals and technical goals?

  - by BAM

  Some background I work at a small startup: 4 devs, 1 designer, and 2 non-technical co-founders, one who provides funding, and the other who handles day-to-day management and sales. Our company produces mobile apps for target industries, and we've gotten a lot of lucky breaks lately. The outlook is good, and we're confident we can make this thing work. One reason is our product development team. Everyone on the team is passionate, driven, and has a great sense of what makes an awesome product. As a result, we've built some beautiful applications that we're all proud of. The other reason is the co-founders. Both have a brilliant business sense (one actually founded a multi-million dollar company already), and they have close ties in many of the industries we're trying to penetrate. Consequently, they've brought in some great business and continue to keep jobs in the pipeline. The problem The problem we can't seem to shake is how to bring these two awesome advantages together. On the business side, there is a huge pressure to deliver as fast as possible as much as possible, whereas on the development side there is pressure to take your time, come up with the right solution, and pay attention to all the details. Lately these two sides have been butting heads a lot. Developers are demanding quality while managers are demanding quantity. How can we handle this? Both sides are correct. We can't survive as a company if we build terrible applications, but we also can't survive if we don't sell enough. So how should we go about making compromises? Things we've done with little or no success: Work more (well, it did result in better quality and faster delivery, but the dev team has never been more stressed out before) Charge more (as a startup, we don't yet have the credibility to justify higher prices, so no one is willing to pay) Extend deadlines (if we charge the same, but take longer, we'll end up losing money) Things we've done with some success: Sacrifice pay to cut costs (everyone, from devs to management, is paid less than they could be making elsewhere. In return, however, we all have creative input and more flexibility and freedom, a typical startup trade off) Standardize project management (we recently started adhering to agile/scrum principles so we can base deadlines on actual velocity, not just arbitrary guesses) Hire more people (we used to have 2 developers and no designers, which really limited our bandwidth. However, as a startup we can only afford to hire a few extra people.) Is there anything we're missing or doing wrong? How is this handled at successful companies? Thanks in advance for any feedback :)

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