As somebody who has worked as a contractor developing software for startups for the better part of a decade, I'm here to tell you that you get what you negotiate. Renegotiating the contract you are working in the light of success is very bad form. Live and learn.

When I read the headline, my head parsed "Smithsonian celebrates 150 Years of COBOL" ... but I guess that's just because when it's COBOL, it only feels like 150 years.

Build better bugs, experience more fruitful testing.

I've been in the situation where a manager in a crunch period really slowed the whole thing down because they were demanding explanations of every check-in. I've also had the experience of having a technical manager save the team no end of hassle by running interference and buffering us from the political realities even higher up the chain in crunch periods; in those cases the manager was technical enough to just let us get on with it.