shops

Enterprise shops throw out perfectly good stuff because they're redecorating or it's lifecycled out because it's recurring budgeted.

Considerable experience with small & medium sized businesses - mostly Windows shops, but Linux experience as well.

Producing good original code is hard and cannot be done in sweat shops under a tight deadline.

Keep in mind it’s been in production at Factual and other serious minded shops for years now.

There are even smaller shops you can find that might be able to do it at a reasonable cost.

Which is definitely good but very comparable to unimpressive mid-senior level devs at many development shops.

Then shops big enough to afford them tend to have a custom workflow built in already.

In Ghana they are used extensively as shops/storefronts, but no one lives in shipping containers.

I go into many shops where the people they call 'programmer', for example, really and simply are not.

If you don't have one, make one, they're not expensive, you can make them same day if necessary at some local print shops.

This kind of thing is done all the time in enterprise shops.

I even know some professionals who are running PC shops who have abandoned Firefox and are refusing to install it on client's computers!

Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs were launching small shops left and right.

I am at one of those "average" shops, as are most people (by definition, although maybe not in the HN community).

If the article author works at one of those "average" shops, I think he has every reason to consider his experience on news.yc as a breath of fresh air and tell other people about it as an example.

But there's a weird corporate dance going on with "solutions" companies like IBM and Accenture, who subcontract through overseas outsourcing firms (sometimes derogatorily called "body shops"), who in turn use the H1B program to bring over some of their staff to the U.