I think many software projects should be called “done”, but startups hire lots of people and add tons of new features in the name of growth.

I’m working on a SaaS service that does one thing really well, and I think it’s pretty close to being done. The code is very solid, and I rarely see any bugs or error reports (thanks to React, Immutable.js, and Flow.) The infrastructure is autoscaling and requires very little maintenance (thanks to convox.)

There’s always more features and integrations I could add, but I’m getting enough customers without them. It will require some ongoing work (e.g. updates for security vulnerabilities), but I’m not too interesting in trying to turn my table into a house. I'd rather follow the Unix philosophy and build a lot of very nice tables.

Flow is fantastic. But nowadays I eschew Immutable for flow-static-land Lenses, with the amazing “decoders” library for handling JSON. That lets me use standard raw objects in a type-safe way with real runtime validation, and with cleaner types than you get with Immutable and Flow!

This is why I wish I had gotten into video game development rather than app development. Once the game is finished it is (for the most part) complete.

Are you being sarcastic? The game industry is the hardest and most miserable. Surely you haven't missed that.

I guess, if you pick badly then it probably is. I've been working in video games for 4 years now(as a C++ engine programmer) and I'm still enjoying it a lot. We ship a project, millions of people enjoy it, it feels great. The last time I had to do overtime was 2 years ago I think, I'm usually home by 5pm and get to do other stuff I really enjoy. The pay could be a bit better, but seriously, the superb job satisfaction and good work-life balance is worth the slight reduction in pay compared to companies where you hate every second of being there.

Alright, nice to hear there are still decent companies out there. Its easy to get the image that the entire industry is really bad.

The worst games to work on are the sports franchises, they have to be out before the next season starts because the team lineups might change next season.

I got into video game development. It is mostly fun and interesting work and I have never regretted it. Sometimes when I was younger I was exploited for my passion with long hours or poor pay but the game industry largely grew out of that. It can still be tough especially on triple A games with huge marketing budgets... nothing puts pressure on managers and a team like a 7-8 figure marketing spend or a launch deadline that cannot be moved (sports seasons, movie releases, thanksgiving) Video games are software and software does not like to be told to finish in the next N weeks no matter how many bugs or how complex they are, or new features that have been dreamed up and must be implemted. This is where tales of long death marches come from. Even those are not ubiquitous. Anyway finally I get to your point: games are online now and they often don’t finish at launch. You can now continue to fix bugs and tweak gameplay after launch and have users update. Not only that but work begins on downloadable expansions and some games have live stores and other online services like leaderboards. I switched to the mobile game industry which is a lot less punishing on staff because you rarely have hard deadlines and games ramp up more slowly. They tend to run for 3-5 years so there is no final release. This means more career stability because AAA teams tend to have layoffs after launch and sometimes disband entirely.

Not since the rise of DLC. With companies providing DLC support for years after release, games are moving to a SaaS-like model.

Take, for example, Crusader Kings II, a game released in 2012 that's still getting DLC and free patches subsidized by DLC sales to this day.

And there's also this infographic about day-one DLC that's been going around for a few years now: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DLCWor...

I read that's a rough industry.