[veyh]

I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out.

I have been part of some social circles before but they were always centered around a common activity like a game, and once that activity went away, so did those connections.

As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me that not having any kind of social network (not even social media accounts) may have added an additional level of difficulty.

I am still working on the side hustles, though.

[nuancebydefault]

> it's more like requirements come in, and results come out.

Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.

[nomel]

I've seen it many many times, a few from myself.

It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.

It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."

Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.

[ragall]

I've seen that plenty of times. I suspect that you haven't seen it because you live in a place with high cost of living, which induces a high turnover in personnel, or perhaps you've been working in very dynamic markets such as SaaS.

When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.

[shiroiuma]

>I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country

This isn't possible in the USA. Companies like this (small, and not in tech hub cities) always try to take advantage of their location and pay peanuts, with the excuse "the cost of living is lower here!", even though it's not that much lower (and not as low as they think), and everything besides houses costs the same nationwide.

[ragall]

I agree that something like that is very unlikely in the US, which is why so many people in this thread (I presume Americans) were incredulous as to whether that was even possible, but elsewhere in Europe good software and electronic/electrical engineers can be making very good money for the local standards in stable jobs, while at the same time being paid a lot less than they would be in a similar job in one of the US major tech hubs.

[veyh]

Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.

[pmg101]

I mean... This "realization" is what triggered the advent of agile, 2 decades ago, right?

People almost never know what they want, so put SOMETHING in front of them, fast, and let's go from there