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Working as a software engineer for a dev shop with projects vs a product company

Geshan Manandhar on October 14, 2018

I started my programming career as a software engineer/developer from a dev shop (I can’t find the right term for it, call it a dev shop, web agenc...
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Riekus van Montfort

It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose: I founded a software / product business and was a dev there for 10 years. I moved to an agency a year a ago and I love the diversity of projects I work on now, the learning opportunities and working with multiple clients.

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rhymes

Thanks Geshan!

I've worked with both and now I'm a freelancer, I have to say that I never seem to decide between either. They both are valid ways to increase knowledge and advance one's career. The issue present themselves when you're not working on something you're interested in. The advantage of the services company is that you might be able to switch to something else, it's a little harder in a mid sized company that has a few if not one product.

Probably a developer in its career should try both :D

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Geshan Manandhar

Both why not :)

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Vincent Quigley

In my experience a dev shop (services company) will ship you from project to project and work you to the bone.you are shipped out to customers who pay a premium daily rate and expect 110% of you.

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Geshan Manandhar

That is also true to an extent.

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Vincent Quigley • Edited

Yeah there's no absolute definition. I believe my experience was the extreme services company where you are not valuable if you are not billable to a customer. Put me off services companies for a long time. Still won't go back.

Mature product companies are more about stained development paces and long term maintainability.

Start up companies regardless of the sector are a different story. Just buckle up for the ride.

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Antonio Radovcic

only a bad one.

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rhymes

Stay away from body rentals :D

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Fed

One I disagree with in relation to Product Companies:

"As a developer, there is not a way to completely change the software design, data model or the software stack as generally its already running."

From what I've seen, it's far easier to refactor software for an internal project (and more opportunity to do so), then convincing a client to pay a fortune to change from jQuery to Angular when the site already works - and they see nothing wrong with it.