"Princeton could USE a man like Joel."

     - Hope for all us unconventional interview candidates, from "Risky Business" 1983

I've been living off my incredible shrinking stock portfolio, hanging out in local coffee shops and restaurants with my laptop, working with WPF and other development technologies...  for too long now, and I'm itching to APPLY these new technologies and practices, to something challenging and interesting, working with people who are "smart, and get things done".

In addition to pointing out that I'll be starting my job search in the depths of a nation-wide employment freeze, friends have predicted that hiring managers will reject me because of my recent "sabbatical", but I think any company that would consider intense work with next generation development technologies on my own dime to be a BAD thing is probably one I wouldn't want to work at anyway 

I'm obviously delusional enough to think I can still afford to be picky, and there are some situations I'm really hoping to AVOID this time around...

• The New Number 6:  "This 'best practices' stuff all sounds very interesting, but right now what we really need is for someone to take over John's code.  We're down to five developers now that John got fed up and quit, no one undertands his stuff, and marketing has commited us to delivering a big stack of new features in eight months."
• How Hard Could It Be?:  "We can't spare any of our hardware engineers to spend a weekend knocking out this 'simple' software, so we want to hire you.  We've already done the hard part of defining the database schema, and we just need you to add a few things and get together with marketing to slap on some kind of pretty UI."
• Brain Silos: "Joe is designing data access, Tim is handling remote comms, Fred is responsible for security... you don't need to concern yourself with those issues, and they don't need to be a part of discussions involving your area."
• Plug-and-Play Developers:  "We're going to need to pull you and Joe off the project for eight weeks to jump on a new marketing request.  Remedial Roger's not doing anything right now, so he can fill in until you get back, and then maybe we'll have you split your time 60/40 between projects X and Y..."
• Sacred Tablets:  "I'm not sure what you mean by 'Agile', but we follow the process described in this 5 inch thick binder, written ten years ago"
• Invertebrates:  "Yes, we've all been saying for years how we should be doing X, Y, and Z, but what can we do?"

I have this fantasy where I work in an environment where we avoid doing things we already know are dumb before we even start, and where we actually FIX things we discover we got wrong along the way.  I'm not holding out hope for an environment as enlightened as Fog Creek, but a company should fall within some REASONABLE RANGE on these issues.

Some organizations believe they "can't afford" to spend time refactoring their development process, especially in the current economic environment, when its probably the adoption of a more streamlined iterative process, featuring cross-functional teams, relying on a smaller number of more capable individuals, that is likely to have the most dramatic long-term positive impact on a company's software development costs, schedules, and quality.