I’ve worked in a lot of development environments and not all of them were well run. I guess thinking back on those places I also absolutely hated the political environments. Where decisions were made not because they were the best decisions for the customer, product, or company, but because someone wanted a promotion.

Kim: Agreed about spec’s, however, my guess is you are talking about big projects with long duration. This is mainly a waterfall problem. In a dynamic environment big projects are poorly spec’d almost by definition.

Good points, Jim. BTW: Expectation management can be a huge frustration both externally and internally.

Integration of poorly documented external systems. Sllightly different that maintaining someone else’s code. We receive external data feeds or mission critical data elements from sources that cannot be replaced and who have no vested interest in making our programming comfortable. However, since their systems “work” the blame tends to fall to our group.

Major players with long release cycles that release unclean code. Microsoft and ESRI are two big ones for us that have repeatedly given us systems that work 90% of the way. Unfortunately, we really needed that 10%. Since we build very unusual applications, we tend to discover more than one new bug , issue or oversight in major tools in every project.

And the good type of frustration that comes from playing with leading edge technologies and systems that don’t have years of sample code, forum posts, or articles behind them.