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

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 agency, software house or web company anything that makes sense to you. Basically a agency/company that takes up projects to survive and grow). It was a small web shop with less people, however I was introduced to an open source web development MVC framework in PHP and a great deal to learn about how professional web and software development is carried out.

After that in the entrepreneurial drive we gave our company a physical presence and put our heart and soul in building it, I worked there for 2 years plus in total and was involved in many projects. It was an amazing learning experience and I could see my growth. Then I went for my masters and after that joined a company in Dubai which is a product company (The company and the product is same, there are no projects as such, all it cares about is the product - nothing more nothing less). I've been working with this company for over a year now. I consider myself lucky to be working with start-ups, they really teach you lot of other things than only hard skills of coding and solving technical problems.



This is not a story about where I worked, instead its a comparison of what I learned in the course of years of working as a developer or some other name to the role that involves at least some coding. Start-ups or established companies, small 2 people company or a company with hundreds of developers, the basic distinction you need to make is does the company take up client projects and deliver them or builds its own product to sustain itself in the market. Here are some of the differences you get when working for both the types of companies.

Working for a dev shop

Generally when you work for a dev shop you would generally experience the things mentioned below:

• You can decide on a new way of doing things from software architecture to design and data modeling as you start fresh you have all the decision to make. Basically its a clean slate where you draw the picture but in a team obviously.
• In a single day you will work on 2-3 projects, code a feature for Project A, solve a bug in Project B and deploy (usually a git push and pull or upload files) for Project C.
• In a new project you can start fresh choose your framwork (may be this time you want to go with Symfony 2 and not Zend, use Angular.js instead of Jquery). If you are in a decision making position you can do it, this will also depend on what client wants if s/he has a say and also the company policy. 
• Multiple project might have multiple frameworks or even languages (as mentioned above) in use and then you need to juggle all those.
• Sometimes even though you are developer you will get to make your hands dirty with some system administrator (sys admin) job of setting up domain, domain name servers and space allocation for Project A.
• Some other time the Front end guy + designer is not available and you write 3 lines of CSS to fix that overflow in the image for client X. It happens like that ;). Same thing you should sometime open photo-shop and move that image 5 pixels to the right. (This will heavily depend on the team size and responsibilities, in a start-up it will be expected)
• A project management methodology will be in paper at many times, collaborating among teams (basically front-end and back-end) becomes a challenge at times. Even release management is a myth ;).
• You meet many people who voice their requirements and depending on if its a website or web app (a web software I mean), sometimes it becomes difficult to put a price to the effort.
• On the management level, the company might lack a clear vision and goal (unless the company is funded by investors first question is how to sustain the company if its a start-up).