Expertise now says from when it can be earned. Hunting for Cloud or API experience in 1981 was hopeless; the entry now names the year contracts for it appear.
The founder can be assigned by hand again when they speak one of a contract's languages - the button used to be greyed out on multi-language jobs while "Fill Team" put them to work anyway.
Every decline asks back, not only the one on the dearest offer.
Letting someone go asks first, naming who leaves and which salary ends.
Contracts sort by days left, and deadlines are counted in days everywhere instead of mixing days, weeks and months.
New roster filters: not in training, on maintenance, not on maintenance.
The board opens with work running instead of fully parked, and bugs can be set to queue themselves from a chosen severity up.
Window sizes the screen cannot show are no longer offered - on scaled displays the list names the real pixels.
Branches can be closed. If anybody still sits there, the game asks where they go, or whether they go.
Economy and progression
QA prepares while "test at the end" holds testing back - the banked hours shorten the test phase later instead of the tester waiting empty-handed.
An acquired company hands over its running contracts, deadlines and all - and the price can be haggled over.
Era goals name their technologies and where each stands, instead of just "0/2".
Skill points stop piling up pointlessly: only what can still be spent is collected.
Perl, SQL, Kotlin and Swift finally appear in contracts - Perl was in exactly one of 24 contract types, though the 80s era goal asks for it.
Specializations can be learnt from one kind of work again. Backend meant database plus API - and no contract type taught both.
Maintenance contracts
The fee is earned, not subscribed to. Half is the retainer for being on call, half is earned per ticket closed. A contract nobody touches now pays the retainer alone.
Staff put on maintenance duty get paid for it. The tickets they closed counted for nothing, so playing it the intended way collected half the fee.
A contract is priced by the work it makes. A server-management system raises three times the tickets of a basic one and paid the least per hour worked, which made taking only small contracts simply the right answer. Per ticket, a long contract is still the cheaper one to hold.
A client takes back at most what they paid. The termination claw-back could ask for more than the contract had ever brought in.
A month lost to a burning deadline is made up in a month - it used to take three.
Bugs on the board
A bug is as hard as the thing it hides in. It inherits its feature's complexity; maintenance tickets and post-delivery defects take the project's. Knowing the language makes a complicated bug easier.
Serious bugs get retested. A fixed bug moves into the testing column and has to hold there. If it does not, it goes back to the backlog - same card, with a counter, and every further pass costs more.
Trivial ones do not. Nobody writes a test case for a typo.
A tester earns their keep twice over. QA works a retest four times as fast as a developer pulled off building to do it.
One click on the board's sort button is one step. Every mouse press used to reset the sort before anything asked whether a card had been hit, which made the button feel jumpy or stuck.
The office location list scrolls, and the button for opening a new one stays put. It used to sit below every existing branch in the same list, moving further down with each one until it was out of reach.