This is a difficult question to answer and not one that most people will
have the time to answer during the day but I am interested to know what
other programmers do in their workplace. In particular.
How many projects you work on in a year?
4-5. I tend to be of the view that if you are doing projects that are
planned to take more than 3 months, then the work should be broken down to
avoid Incis like monolithic projects, (besides after 6 months on a project
most programmers are bored to tears). On the other hand I can't see any
meaningful development project taking less than ~2-3 weeks by the time you
doing the product defn, tech spec, planning, implementation, testing, review
etc. IMHO projects per year should probably lie somewhere between 4 .. 12
What is the nature of these projects?
n/a
What type of skill range is required?
One of the challenges I think we all face is that the we have to know & use
a range of tools. Already this year, I have worked on Delphi1, Delphi 4, VB
(yukky) and VC++ (on a non-intel platform). By the end of the year I will
probably have worked on at least one other language (Java) and possibly
more. Most commonly used tools though are not the compilers but probably
Word, Outlook, Excel and Project - maybe I am just unlucky but a huge
percentage of time goes in the paper work (development & user documentation)
which does seem to pay off in less programming time.
The reason I ask is that here we have over about a dozen major applications,
about 1200 dlls as part of the whole system, a simple paradox database
system, an intranet with web issuing system and we handle all support as
well. This is handled by only 1 senior programmer and 1 junior programmer.
Does this seem sufficient to you?
I don't know because it depends on the nature of the work - if the each DLL
or app is radically different then the workload is huge - if the apps are
consistent & have high re-use the it is not so bad.
It also depends on the support you get - if you have good customer support
people, IT support and testers then you will have time to program - which is
a huge advantage. If you are expected to walk users through how to switch
on the computer then productivity is going to suffer greatly - I find
customer support & programming do not form a great fit.
I assume from your comments that you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the
workload. I would take this up with you management & ask for help (be
objective - take a look at your timesheet). If you don't get it, then you
might want to look around at other companies - there is demand for
experinced programmers.
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