
Working at big software companies - rdcastro
http://blog.sacaluta.com/2012/08/working-at-big-software-companies.html
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bradly
After working for various start-ups and freelancing most my, I took a full-
time contract at Inuit (TurboTax/Quicken) about a year a go. I was very
surprised how much I enjoyed the work there. The start-ups I worked at were
never huge successes so getting the chance to work on a Rails app that gets
hundreds of thousands of requests per minute (it's embedded in TurboTax) was
something new for me and provided a different set of challenges.

I've also found that large companies (or at least Intuit) are very open to
progression and innovation. When I started our team was on Ruby 1.8.7, Rails
2.3.5, in a physical data center, used Perforce, and a bunch of other
"enteprise" software suites. Now we are cranking on latest versions of Ruby
and Rails, Github, AWS, and Campfire.

It has been a much more rewarding experience than I would have thought. Oh and
you have no idea how good it feels to get real, publicly traded stock :)

~~~
rdcastro
I absolutely agree that typically the impact you can have at a big company can
be huge. But it may come with a cost - adjustment to that structure.

As I mentioned in the post, it is a great environment for many people, and I'm
glad to hear about your case.

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dotmanish
The " _You're Not Working With The Owner_ " aspect of a big company is usually
the most underrated reason why some companies succeed in hiring and retaining
top performers, and some don't.

The immediate manager is a major reason, from what I've seen, for why people
leave or love their jobs. The manager may not even share the same ethics that
need to flow down in the company from the founders/owners, and may even work
towards ensuring her/his own appraisal success. This is why maintaining the
big company's culture is such a tough task, and one bad hire at a senior level
can slowly destroy major chunks of it.

~~~
BadassFractal
I worked at a corporate giant where my skip level did not know who I was for
close to 8 months. He never met with any of the employees besides the leads
reporting to him, his manager and his peers. I think he had to find out about
me when I left, but he still didn't even bother trying to talk me out of it.

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sisypheanblithe
How many people were under him?

~~~
BadassFractal
I think somewhere between 30 and 40.

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stcredzero
_> Sometimes some compromises will be made in order to keep the team "stable",
so the business can keep going._

The thing to remember about big companies, is that they've already figured out
some formula to approximately "print money." (Not really in all cases, what I
mean more seriously and generally is just they already know how to make a
profit.) So not rocking the boat will be seen by many there as the rational
thing to do.

~~~
rdcastro
You're absolutely right about that. It takes a lot of courage to do something
that could affect the bottomline for the next quarter. Another thing is that,
when the company's culture rewards those who don't make mistakes rather than
those that are bold and try new stuff (therefore making some mistakes), then
not rocking the boat is institutionalized. New things are not tried, as they
are too risky, and anything old that becomes a liability must be quickly fixed
or gotten rid of.

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btilly
Another phenomena that exists in all companies, but that you really see in big
ones, is secretiveness about how people are actually being rewarded. This has
two purposes. The first is that it allows the company to reward certain
employees (particularly top manager) while heading off jealousy among others.
The second is that it allows them to lie to people about how well they are
compensated versus others.

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paganel
I wouldn't want to work for an entity that implements "decision processes",
I'd much rather work for a (small) company that takes decisions. It's that
simple.

Also, even though I'm already in my early 30s the word "career" scares me. I'd
rather build things

~~~
rdcastro
I like your "I'd rather build things". I think you can also build things at
big companies, but it's just different types of things and much different
process. It's just that, depending on your org, you may end up building more
slowly (sometimes way more slowly) or you will build something that was
decided by others and that you didn't have much input on.

~~~
ironchef
To be fair, some times you can build things much faster as the process for
capital expenditure of sizes necessary is more straightforward. "Oh? You need
to spend 20 million dollars on some hardware? Cool. Follow this accelerated
RFP procedure."

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wccrawford
I've never worked at a "big company", but I've worked at small ones, and one
of those grew to be medium-sized.

One thing that I notice that's missing from the article is support.

At every small company, I was in charge of more than 1 aspect of the product,
even if that wasn't my area of expertise. I've even been in charge of _every_
aspect, as the sole employee that could handle them.

This is extremely exciting and fun, for a while. Eventually, it wears on you
and you need someone else. As the company grew and we hired more and more, I
eventually settled down into having 1 main thing I was responsible for, and
even that could have been handled by someone else if needed. (For vacations,
even.)

Because of that, I don't want to work at a small company again. Being able to
go to a database-specialist and ask for help with performance was amazing.
Even though I enjoyed all those hours of DB tuning and learning about it, I'd
rather have been coding. (And of course, the DB guy would rather be doing DB-
guy-stuff. They tried asking him to code, and that didn't go well. It wasn't
what he was good at. To be fair, I was similarly inept at DB tuning at first,
but when there was nobody else, you couldn't tell how bad I was. Heck, I
couldn't tell, either.)

Anyhow, my point is that bigger companies have a network of employees to lean
on for support, where smaller companies require more of people.

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sseveran
I worked at a big software company and will never go back. The aspiring to
mediocrity is the order of the day. I should never have gone to a fortune 500
and I never will again. The culture is corrosive.

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neil_s
Interesting viewpoint, timely as I am interning at a big bank that has a tech
division and trying to decide whether this is the kind of firm I want to work
for.

Also, @rdcastro, you're looking for segue, not Segway.

~~~
rdcastro
Thanks for the correction. Text updated.

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rekisu
I don't know why but consulting always seems to get left out of these types of
discussions. As an consultant at a company of about 200 in size I get to
influence decision making and innovation within the company - while learning
about the ins and outs of medium-big companies.

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coldskull
Wow!...perfectly described -- thats all i can say :)

