Can you go into more details? Why did something take 30 minutes or longer to build? Was the environment being cleaned every time? Was an artifact server not being used?
I've had long turnarounds (other than the artificial punchcard hell that is really just economics surfaced by IT budgets) in many projects. The ones that come to mind:
- Burning EPROMs for the hardware bring-up of a consumer 68000 machine. Download and burn time for six EPROMs was well over 45 minutes. Things got better when we wrote a downloader, but initial bring-up was kind of painful for a couple of months.
- An unbelievably crappy and development-hostile environment for set-top boxes. Getting 900K of code to a device could take 20-30 minutes, and the transfers often just abjectly failed. "Working as designed" said the people running the head-end. If you wonder why set-top-box software sucks so hard, this is one of the reasons. The whole TV industry is a fractal of shitty practices. Not that I'm bitter. [I did a work-around that let us do dynamic code loading over a different pipe that we theoretically weren't supposed to use "for network stability purposes" and got a biiig bonus after our team's productivity went way up]
- Game development using a cross-assembler on a minicomputer,. The mini was also used as the department's email and office memo system. 45 minutes during the day turned into less than 5 minutes at night, so you can imagine the hours I kept.
- Working on some Windows internals, the less said about this, the better.
The common thread: When bad decisions and designs were institutionalized, things never got better. When it was possible for individuals to improve things, they did.
- Burning EPROMs for the hardware bring-up of a consumer 68000 machine. Download and burn time for six EPROMs was well over 45 minutes. Things got better when we wrote a downloader, but initial bring-up was kind of painful for a couple of months.
- An unbelievably crappy and development-hostile environment for set-top boxes. Getting 900K of code to a device could take 20-30 minutes, and the transfers often just abjectly failed. "Working as designed" said the people running the head-end. If you wonder why set-top-box software sucks so hard, this is one of the reasons. The whole TV industry is a fractal of shitty practices. Not that I'm bitter. [I did a work-around that let us do dynamic code loading over a different pipe that we theoretically weren't supposed to use "for network stability purposes" and got a biiig bonus after our team's productivity went way up]
- Game development using a cross-assembler on a minicomputer,. The mini was also used as the department's email and office memo system. 45 minutes during the day turned into less than 5 minutes at night, so you can imagine the hours I kept.
- Working on some Windows internals, the less said about this, the better.
The common thread: When bad decisions and designs were institutionalized, things never got better. When it was possible for individuals to improve things, they did.