Ah, P2K.
I worked as a contractor helping to spec a feature for the first 3G phones, then I went permie down in Toulouse to work on developing it (fancied living in France) - Big mistake.
The bureaucracy was huge. I ended up resigning after a year. In that time, as a developer, I ended up writing just four lines of code. Also of interest was when senior management realized that what we were working on would turn around an almost instance profit once it was released - cue endless politics and turf wars as various senior managers tried to grab a piece of the action.
During this time the actual implementation of the feature was whittled down from a full functionality to one with only a couple of functions (due to constant replanning, direction changes,etc). As someone who actually likes to get stuff done it was very disheartening.
Still, apart from that I had a very enjoyable year living in Toulouse. And the Motorola canteen there was excellent.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
