I quite enjoyed my experience at VW! It was (and probably still is) a wonderful place to work. I have frankly never been more productive in my career. My team (and I got the impression that this was also the case for most teams) was very hands-off, just let people work. The employees are grown ups, so if they need to collaborate they can do so in an ad-hoc fashion instead of forcing them to do agile rituals. For most of my time there, I had exactly one scheduled meeting a week, you could call it weekly stand-up, and a lot of ad-hoc collaboration with my teammates.
For people like me, who don't need and frankly chafe against the added structure of most agile methodologies, VW was amazing. I could just put on my headphones and code, and that's pretty much all I ever wanted. I ended up leaving because as much as I loved the workplace, I have pretty much 0 interest in the actual product. CAD is cool, and I like working on professional tools, but I have no interest whatsoever in architecture and design. I still wonder, though, if leaving VW was a mistake. If I ever find myself living in the DC metro, I will certainly reapply.
Wow, sounds awesome! What types of projects did you work on for the platform/product? Since I’ve become very familiar with Revit’s API (and its shortcomings) I often wonder if I should consider a role on the actual Revit dev team helping to improve the actual product itself, but I have never contributed to anything like it. What industry did you land in?
I ended up working mostly on features that architects could use to present projects. Stuff like renders and walkthrough animations of the building.
I've moved from CAD to computer-aided engineering. I work on the backend of a compiler for a DSL for control system engineering. My niche is definitely professional tools programming. I'm quite happy where I am right now, but if something ever happened with this job, my preference would be to pivot to another professional tool. I've always thought something like a DAW or 3D modeling software would be fun to work on.
For people like me, who don't need and frankly chafe against the added structure of most agile methodologies, VW was amazing. I could just put on my headphones and code, and that's pretty much all I ever wanted. I ended up leaving because as much as I loved the workplace, I have pretty much 0 interest in the actual product. CAD is cool, and I like working on professional tools, but I have no interest whatsoever in architecture and design. I still wonder, though, if leaving VW was a mistake. If I ever find myself living in the DC metro, I will certainly reapply.