www.hitechsaloon.com

Most companies which rely exclusively on Internet-based services are driven by the same principle: to make money with as little investment as possible. Nothing wrong with that, only that the amount of pressure is at times unbearable for me. Most of all, I believe it's unjustified.

I've worked in different environments: a charity, a small IT start-up, a procurement consultancy firm, a part government-owned organisation and now for another internet company. On paper the job looked great: I would have joined a dynamic young and highly motivated team of bright minds. I didn't think twice before accepting the job.
Shortly after joining the company the problems started. What I would expect from a good manager is that the newcomer understands how the business operates, how it makes money. Fortunately the induction partially covered all that. After that, nothing: I was assigned a few tasks and expected to complete them asap. Very little explanation was given on where to start looking in the codebase but most of all I had not yet gained a thorough understanding of the business requirements. Other than a few outdated pages on an internal wiki nothing was documented. Every time I asked for help I was told I was expected to figure everything out by myself. Because everyone was extremely busy no one actually had a chance to sit down with me and explain how the platform works. The fact that it is built on Zend Framework obviously helps but that's helpful only to an extent.
I understand management put a lot of pressure to product managers and CTOs but isn't also their job to make sure that the team members feel happy and motivated rather than frustrated and unrewarded?
Business drives development of new features and could not care less about the abstract benefits of refactoring. Instead, developers are expected to write software the scales well, meets (better if it exceeds) the expectations and that can be easily altered as requirements change.
Internet companies tend to save money as much as possible. One area where they should not save excessively is technology. After all they make money thanks to technology and as such management should realize the importance of hiring qualified staff since the beginning. Instead, quite often small internet companies they realize way too late when it's time to hire a team of experienced developers and software architects who, when looking at early versions of the software, wonder whether the company has appointed someone who could barely use WYSIWYG editors to build complex web applications. So ultimately the software architecture will probably haven proven wrong. In modern times this isn't really anyone's fault, but how to convince your manager(s) that structural changes are necessary in order to make RAD actually possible and not a never-ending struggle? Upper management's drive towards profitability (or to increase it) and more appealing to potential buyers makes this nearly impossible.
Unfortunately, this leads to the usual questions. Why should I work much harder than I would in other companies? Why should I work longer hours? Why should I stay in the office to fix yet another fuck-up at 6.30pm when it could have been avoided but of course your boss doesn't want to listen to good advice?
How about earning a lot more money instead? And if you don't like the job - who cares? That's why I'd like to try out a contracting career.