I stayed until I finished it. It wasn't a rwrite anymore, only the application stayed the same, and even then we added a ton of functionality (e.g. morphological analysis as well as identification.) It's something I wanted to complete as I literally built huge parts of it by myself and wanted it to succeed. I took what I learned at the previous company and had a chance to build something similar from the ground up under my own (technical) direction. It was a bit of a pride thing.
Honestly, having worked in medical devices for more than a decade, a five year dev cycle isn't crazy. All said and done it was about three years of dev due to the aforementioned detours (shiny object chasing by management.)
In the beginning there were two other devs on the team, but they were web guys and primarily concerned with CRUD stuff. They were laid off and ~1 year later we hired three more, but again, primarily concerned with the web side and third party integrations. I was all hardware, image processing, image viewing, and image analysis, only helping them when needed. These images are multiple gigapixel (~20GB uncompressed), so just managing and viewing them is a lot of work.
Can you recommend any good biotech companies in image/optics? I just got my degree in BioEng. in bio-optics and have been pretty unsuccessful in getting any traction on the job market.
I was involved in the digital pathology sector. Leica (formerly Aperio) has an office in Vista and I hear it's still a good place to work after the acquisition. You may also try Epic Sciences, indica labs, or BioImagine. There are far more, but you could also try going to local conferences. I used to attend pathology Visions each year. Lots of industry representation and new tech.
You probably know this already, bit look for assay dev labs with existing software groups. Best of both worlds. Otherwise you run the risk of developing software in a culture which inderstands nothing of software dev. Not fun.
Honestly, having worked in medical devices for more than a decade, a five year dev cycle isn't crazy. All said and done it was about three years of dev due to the aforementioned detours (shiny object chasing by management.)
In the beginning there were two other devs on the team, but they were web guys and primarily concerned with CRUD stuff. They were laid off and ~1 year later we hired three more, but again, primarily concerned with the web side and third party integrations. I was all hardware, image processing, image viewing, and image analysis, only helping them when needed. These images are multiple gigapixel (~20GB uncompressed), so just managing and viewing them is a lot of work.