Comment by bradfa

I've worked at 3 different companies over the past 13 years (1 large, 1 small, now 1 medium in size) and in all cases a full product development cycle is on the order of 1-3 years at all of them for both hardware and software. I've shipped tons of stuff. If you're finding "a lot of jobs" which don't involve actually shipping product to customers, maybe you're looking at the wrong kinds of companies or the wrong kind of industry?