I have 7 years experience but I've been working with my company for 6 and a half years, so I know only its work organization. Here IT people like me (developers, operations, network, team leaders, architects, etc.) does not belong to any division whereas project managers and above belong to a single division.
Furthermore IT people, according to seniority, work on different projects at the same time, usually with different roles in each one. For example in the last 2 months I worked on 11 projects:
- 3 on a daily basis, 2 twice a week, 1 once a week, the other between once every two weeks an once a month
- On 1 I’m (acting as) project manager, on 3 I’m a coding team leader, on 1 I’m a non-coding team leader, on 2 I’m a simple developer, on 1 I'm an analyst, on the other I’ve mixed roles
- On 6 projects write code, on 5 not
- 1 project is in a preliminary stage, 3 are in development, 2 are near final release, 1 is going through post release process, the other are in maintenance mode
- Projects refer to 6 different divisions
- 9 projects are for external clients, 2 are internal projects
- 1 is a product my company sells to multiple clients, the other are client dedicated projects
- 1 project is using agile methodologies, 4 are agile-ish, the other standard projects
- Smallest team is 2 people (me and a coworker), biggest is 24 people
Especially during the last 2 years (when I attended meetings with clients where I met people from other companies) I listened to many comments from external people saying that they are very surprised (someone even frankly shocked) by the way we work and how I am able to not burn out after a month. I have no experience outside my company and I genuinely thought that this was the standard.
So I’m asking you: is my company work organization so uncommon? In the event that I decide to change job, will this situation affect my chances?