I'm genuinely looking for a "calm" company. Is there such a thing? I have a few anecdotal stories of companies being absolutely chaotic (my current one included). I don't know where to point fingers to. I could start at pointing myself. Customers demanding custom features. Execs and sales people asking for unreasonable estimates. Engineers not feeling safe enough to say "no" but have to make something work, introducing tech debts. Engineers picking technology tools without much research, because there is no time, which increases complexity. People leaving, and then new people can't understand everything holistically. All of these factors combined into one gigantic bowl of mess.
Go find a well established company where you can work on an existing product. I work on a legacy point of sale product that started life in the 80’s and is still powering a good chunk of commerce around the world. I work on a small yet efficient team who customize the product for retailers. It is all about the team you’re on though. My company is also releasing all kinds of new products and services. I doubt anyone would describe working on those teams as calm.
I'm contracted to the IT branch of a certain pharma company and it's been calm the whole time.
Projects are either about regulatory compliance (boring, but not challenging) or supporting research - the big brains do the thinking, while you just klaka klaka klaka away at the implementation.
A visible chunk of the latter goes nowhere and eventually gets cancelled, but everyone is fine with that.
The more insulated you are from sales / overhead cost reduction pressure, the calmer things will be. Just make sure you're insulated, not so far that you're seen as a cost center as opposed to a revenue generator
Both companies I've worked for rely on government contracts, and in general feel pretty calm. It's hard to feel super rushed when the software isn't delivered for a few years. I don't think I make anywhere near industry salary though.
I had calmness when I was individual contributor working alone on difficult long-term projects, involving both research and development.
Bi-monthly or weekly meeting with the CTO, and that was it.
Delivery was on time simply because I adjusted the work and constraints to match the expected deadline. If something wasn't possible or required compromises, I would just let the CTO know. It was often fine.
The problem for me starts when you have chaotic product people in-between business owners and you.
I work as a developer for a company that sell a somewhat niche B2B software that integrates with a lot of customer systems. However we got several large, well-known companies that rely on our products for their daily operation (and a ton of smaller ones).
We got a lot of stuff to do, between new customers pouring in and gov't changing their systems with little warning[1] and such.
However we also don't have most of the other stuff you talk about. Sales ask for estimates, but if our provided estimates don't work for the client, say because the contract with our competitor is due in a month, then they'll work with us to try to find some way of making it work rather than force it through.
There's a lot of freedom with responsibility, so sure for low-impact stuff a developer might try some new tech to learn. However for larger shifts it'll have to be discussed in the dev group, especially if it impacts support. We do have a mature codebase so some tech dept is inevitable, but we have it as a goal to try to improve those things if we need to work on a particularly bad area of the code.
As for people leaving, in the years I've been here there's been a very stable group. So stable our customers ask us how their systems work that we integrate with, as they have much higher churn.
I don't think we're particularly unique though. But we're a relatively small company with a name that you can't flash on a CV, and at first glance our niche might sound boring.
[1]: "yea we redesigned our API, we will be doing a hard cut-over in a couple of months"
That might be unrealistic in some cases but one way to deal with this is to take control over the situation. If you have a recipe to fix a particular problem whether it’s about unrealistic expectations or people not feeling safe - propose it, take full responsibility for the implementation and push it through. It takes a long while though.
Yes, that's absolutely possible. My company is making a b2b product. We have challenges and sometimes the scope of the new features can be huge. But I never felt big pressure.
