> In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.
Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.
I've seen both kinds. GF projects where the senior devs feel that they have to get something right from the beginning, spending a year just on that piece (a set of widgets, a data ingestion framework, a state machine that covers the entire underlying algorithm). And other GF projects which have frequent updates and are open to development with very few speed bumps.
Of course you can call out the former examples as incompetent or hubris, and they will probably occur less and less, but nevertheless they exist.
I was going to say the same. In my experience I can say without hesitation green field projects is how you advance your career, become visible and get promoted.
What is progress? Are you sure that was greenfield?
I think the OP meant projects that required long investments without immediate returns. For instance, a platform migration that requires many components to be finished before it can even be tested. Or, real greenfield, like a new product venture with a unproven customer thesis. The kind that requires months of work before you can go to market and validade... How do you report progress? Components built, percentage completed? Without something a user can drive or a seller sell, that's not progress... It's just speculation.
Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.