Do software engineers care about a face-paced environment? Why not have a balanced environment and take things at normal pace?
I think it's their way of saying: "we have bad project management"
I would think on a good team you have workers who worry mostly about the thing they've been hired to do, and somewhere in authority over them, overseeing the work is a manager or supervisor or project manager that does a few things:
In a situation where this is absent, or there is weak management, you end up with the workers having to project-manage themselves. This means the people that should be worrying about getting work done are also now worrying about how they can coordinate the work, and make communicate between themselves. That's what I assume they would mean by a "fast-paced environment", a job where you have more worries than they are paying you for, and also likely slightly more job duties than would normally fall on you.
I'm not sure there's a 'normal' pace if every company has a different one. Perhaps average pace?
I think they do it to make it seem like they're not highly bureaucratic and conservative. Those aren't qualities many young people like, so they advertise the opposite.
(Don't get me wrong, there are highly bureaucratic and conservative companies out there and there is a reason they do not advertise it)
Because they really offer that.
Most startups, especially in the early phase, work in a reactive manner. They try to catch The Big Fish that will pay their bills. Until they get there they have to live off of the smaller clients, and as they need all the money they can get they have to react to all of the small clients needs or they loose them.
It can be crazy most of the time, and what j writes is not far from the truth (unless the other 3-4 people are good at management).
Now to the question whether programmers care about it… well, it depends. I do like it, thatʼs one reason I work for a startup. The last 18 months was all about reactions. We also caught our first Big Fish, but we had to work hard for months to keep them and prolong their contract and basically sell us to other big companies. What is coming now is a year of spinning down to operations speed: we will need less features, and we can prioritise down small clientsʼ needs in favour of the big onesʼ who, in turn, can wait a bit longer for the solution. And once all the rough edges are taken care about, I may move on to another fast paced place.
CSS & Element Queries
j
stuff ;)
at least that's how I read it. :D