About (page 5)

The Second Job

My current job is very good, and I'd recommend it, although there aren't many positions of its type compared to consultancies and software houses. It's in software engineering and specialises in military research and development. What that means is that our team comes up with ideas, then sets out goals for 6 months, 1 year and 3 years (which is the usual length of a project), then tries to reach the goals using software. The ideas are the things that are sold - in the form of intellectual property. The software is merely the "demonstration of concept," which means that it is there to show that the ideas can work in practice. There is a great deal of flexibility with how this is done, and as long as it shows that an idea works then that's fine.

There's obviously a bias towards using recent technologies, but various languages and third-party applications and almost no formal design methodologies (e.g. DFDs, ERDs and all that crap taught at Uni) are used. One thing I've noticed from my stint at University is that the only people who use formal methodologies are academics and very big companies that specialise in applications. For our purposes (and, presumably, the purposes of small- and medium-sized companies), these would only serve to slow us down and produce huge amounts of paperwork. Instead, we use our own methodologies, which work for us and which are agreed upon by the members of the team.

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