

After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again - KenCochrane
http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/08/ill-never-work-for-a-big-company-again/

======
buff-a
I think there's another issue. At a small company, everyone (usually) has a
stake. Everyone wants to make the company succeed, because having the company
succeed gives each individual a huge payout.

Beyond a certain size, however, new individuals will not receive huge payouts
if the company succeeds. The strategies by which they maximize their
individual return now involve politics, power and control. Short of killing
the company, their reward is maximized by behavior which may hurt the company
(and in my view always hurts the company but I'm bitter). An example of such
behavior are putting forward tech ideas which may not fit the company but
which the individual has had experience, and therefor has seniority and
status. Another would be eliminating competition with bad reviews, or failing
to acknowledge good work.

Beyond a certain size (perhaps its beyond a certain time) a company will be
managed by "players" using the company for their own purposes. Non-players are
identified and eliminated. These players don't really care if you can get the
job done, they just want large departments to manage. In fact hiring idiots
whose job depends on the player's good graces is a great way to balance
intelligent people with legitimate complaints.

No. Wont be working at a large company again.

~~~
iam
I worked at a 100+ person startup that exhibited the same behavior.

So, sorry, but this isn't exclusive to large companies.

~~~
gcp
>100+ person startup

No.

------
jedberg
I've worked at both, and said the exact same thing.

Now I find myself at a big company (Netflix). How did this happen?

When I was looking for a job, I was mostly looking at startups, but the
Netflix job caught my eye, because they are solving a very interesting
technology problem.

I brought up my concerns in the interview, and they convinced me by pointing
out that a lot of people here had come from big tech companies that had
transitioned from startup to big and corporate (two of those being Yahoo and
eBay), and most of those people wanted to avoid that.

So a lot of what is done here is done as a way to retain top talent --
engineers are respected, process is a dirty word. That's really important.
When something goes wrong, the response is not "what rules can we put in place
to prevent this". The response is "how can we educate new employees so they
have to knowledge to make sure this doesn't happen again, and how can we give
them to tools to make this easier?"

That is why I chose to work for a big company again.

Also, it was pointed out to me that if you look at most people in the silicon
valley, they didn't make their money working for startups -- they made it
working for bigger but growing public companies like Yahoo and eBay and now
Google and Netflix.

------
bane
I've worked for large corporations and startups and definitely prefer
startups.

Large corps are so mired in useless, mindless institutional procedures that
you waste inordinate time satisfying the procedure beast, usually in areas
that have nothing to do with your job (fun fact, I once worked as an analyst
for a large corp and spent on average 4 hours a week taking industrial safety
courses, volatile materials storage compliance training, etc.. The chances of
me _ever_ doing anything in the company in a warehouse, assembly plant, or
anything other than look at a computer on a desk in an office park were 0).
Sure there's some politics at the upper levels of a given organizational unit
in a large company, but the pay tends to be pretty good and you'll have pretty
good job security. IMHO large corps are great places to work when you are just
starting out because your mistakes generally will just average out with
everybody else.

Small companies/startups are such an entirely different beast it's night and
day. You have huge impact in everything the company does. A single employee
might account for 40% of the company revenue! The jobs are usually very
versatile, you don't get stuck in a single task, you probably have to learn to
do many different jobs -- you gain more experience than it looks like for a
given unit of time compared to large co. For example, at large co, you might
not be asked to work on contract negotiations until you've been there for 10
years. At startup you might do it from day one.

While large co's problems are mostly procedure issues, Startups are not
without their issues -- and they're usually personnel problems:

1) Politics are magnified beyond belief. In large co, if my division manager
was having a problem with another division manager, I might not even know. In
a startup, it's like watching your parents fight over a family dinner.

2) Because everybody can have such a huge impact, screwups are magnified. A
bad employee can literally sink a company. In a two person startup, that's 50%
of the workforce.

3) There's very few checks against bad employees. One of the reasons large co
_has_ so many mindless procedures is to help control for bad employees.
Startups don't really have a way to do that.

4) Job stability? Pffff...what's that? Pay is often not as good as large co,
and benefits such as options or shares are just paper until you can buy beer
with them.

I was once recruited to work at a very well funded startup that fell apart
during salary negotiations. They wanted to make up for the low salary with
catered meals and an all-you-can-eat pantry, dry cleaning and other benefits
plus some options. I told them I'd rather trade those benefits for a pay check
and would sign an agreement to never touch those benefits -- which wouldn't be
hard since my position would require me to almost never actually be in the
office where those benefits were offered. They backed out and it demonstrating
to me that those benefits were simply flash and not worth the delta in salary
they'd have to pay me.

------
matt_s
I work at an extremely large company - over 100k people across the globe. When
companies get this big, it feels like everything takes forever to get done. I
was just talking with a coworker how at a small company the RetiredOnTheJob
people wouldn't be tolerated.

Funny thing is we used to be in a small group that was empowered to do what it
needed to. Then upper manglement decided to centralize a bunch of functions -
now we have common ways of doing things that don't meet anyone's needs. So I
think as companies grow they need to be more like how the Virgin companies
operate - literally separate divisions in a family corporation. Empower and
measure each small group to do what they need to and leave them alone.

Required reading is the Gervais Principle here:
[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/) After reading this, I now can associate 3
times having gone through the MacLeod Life Cycle. Now on the fourth in a
growing organization. The org is in the second stage moving into the third and
I'm moving from a Loser into the Clueless.

My saving grace is having tough technical problems to solve for my team like
30+ terabytes of files and db, thousands of transactions flowing, making
system "Mission Critical", etc. That plus learning iOS development at home
keeps me sane.

------
toxicflavortwo
I would say the only startup worth working on is your own.

Working at someone else's startup is a recipe for getting exploited -
overworked and underpaid. And the worst thing about it is that it's all
couched in an atmosphere of guilt trips and taking-it-for-the-team.

Perhaps there are exceptions. I just haven't seen any.

I'd rather work for The Man in my day job in a cold corporate environment
where everything is explicit from the get-go, get well paid for it and crank
out code for my own startup in my free time.

------
silverbax88
After working for a startup, I'll never work for another one unless I own at
LEAST 50% of it.

~~~
mathgladiator
How about 51%; stale mates can suck.

------
sophacles
I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog. There are however
exceptions. Some small companies get some guy in charge who was previously
mired in the bureaucracy somewhere and starts trying to impose that on the
little company. Disaster ensues.

On the other end, you can get a good startup feel by finding a good team in a
big company/institution (usually you see this in Academia, but some places in
companies have this too). A well built group will have some admin staff
(secretaries, hands off project managers, etc.) to insulate the core team from
the crazy. When done well, this admin group will fill out the crap forms, hide
various money absurdities, deflect outside poisoners and otherwise do amazing
things to keep the non-admin folks blissfully ignorant.[1] The bosses in such
a group will create or emulate a flat reporting structure, and not let the
external politics apply too much pressure or influence to the team. The core
team will then get to do their thing in a way that feels very much like a
small company or startup.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this of course. Benefits include having a
giant name behind you, and the awesome funding and legal resources available
-- I was once told "you think you need a cluster... we can buy one, just make
sure first". Awesome. Customers say "Oh $BIG_NAME no need to jump you through
these sill hoops to prove yourself". And of course, the feeling of stability
provided by being in the employ of a giant. On the drawback side: you do more
work than a lot of your peers outside the group -- not a big deal but
sometimes mentally taxing. Politics can creep in, so you need to maintain high
productivity and always do a good job, so the bosses can preserve the group by
selling it as "ninja rockstar team alpha" to everyone else. And no matter how
good the shielding, sometimes the crazy still can creep in.

So basically, this is a long winded way of saying: if you are careful, you may
be able to find the startup feel in a big company, or at least the good parts
of it.

[1] I'm fully convinced that good admin staff are worth the same as good
programmers in this type of situation. In my current employment I travel a
lot, but have never filled out an expense report, I dump some receipts with
the admin, answer a few questions, and she takes care of the rest of the
voodoo. Similarly with the HR rep for insurance we have. Purchases are a
simple "hey I need, can you charge it to...". I know there are forms and
procedures -- I've heard horror stories. When we need a new person we tend to
churn a bit til we find a good one, then it's a quick raise and lots of
flattery to keep him/her around. (On a personal side it's always good to be
very nice and friendly to these folks, they do magic :) ).

------
j_baker
I definitely prefer startups. But let's try to be realistic about what working
for a startup is like.

 _You don't see many dumb people at small companies, mainly because there is
no place to hide. In a small company you need to carry your own weight, and if
you don't it is pretty obvious. In a large company it isn't as obvious to find
the slacker._

I'm going to assume the author just doesn't have enough experience to realize
just how naive this is. Startups employ dummies all the time, and you can't
tell because everyone is too busy to pay attention, they're good at playing
politics, they're friends with one of the founders, or they _are_ one of the
founders. And yes, sometimes these startups are successful in spite of that
one or two idiots.

 _Working for a big company has a different feel to it, and you normally have
to worry about office politics and other things that you don't have to worry
about in a small company._

Well, if "small" is two people or less, this is correct. But politics comes
into play whenever you have 3 or more people. Granted, the politics may be
easier to understand and manage, but they're much more ugly than in a big
company.

In short, it sounds like the author found a good startup to work for, which is
usually better than most BigCos. But it's all downhill from there. If the
author stays in the startup game for long enough, I guarantee he'll work for a
company that will make him miss BigCos and their rules (some of which benefit
the employee).

------
gcp
While I agree with the author on many parts, I do think he misses the ball on
some issues.

For example, there seems to be an argument being made that a lot of the
structure in big companies, as compared to start-ups, is to keep "lesser"
people from making mistakes. But, I think that is far from reality.

If you're a startup, you have no employees, no sales and no users. No users
means no support to give, no need to check if your latest changes fail on some
obscure configurations, no infrastructure to handle the load, no critical bug-
fixing of now outdated versions, etc, no fear to make significant changes and
break things. No employees means no human resource handling, simpler paycheck
administration, less managerial overhead. No sales means less administration,
less regulatory burden, no internationalization issues, less need for
documentation, and so on.

There's a different kind of company needed to innovate compared to the kind of
company needed to sell a product worldwide in a competitive market with low
margins.

There's only a few companies that handle can both at the same time. (Bigger
ones buying up small ones don't count)

That being said, a small company where the product is in flux generally
requires the engineers to have broader skillsets and tends to allow them to
make more wide-ranging design choices. That just doesn't happen at bigger
companies or with established products. You spend most of your time
maintaining things.

------
mattmanser
There's no office politics in a micro company as there's no point, one person
often has absolute power. And even if it's not one person, the founders will
often trust each other a lot more than you. That's fine until you don't agree
with one of them.

1\. The case of the mysterious Piggy Bank

This caused a lot of problems at a 2 founder startup I worked at where the guy
looking after the books was semi-inadvertently skewing everything in his
favour, the company paid for renovations to the office that was actually his
property he'd just bought. He claimed to have 'invested' £100k (leant) but he
was constantly calling in those loans. But then putting some back. And then
taking it again. In tiny chunks of a few £k here and there. And the
accountants were incompetent and couldn't keep track (the semi-inadvertent
part of it). It took me a month and a lot of late nights with paper accounts
and excel to convince the other founder what was going on. When I cut through
the accountants' mess I found at one point he actually owed the company £10k
for a few months.

The only reason I started looking is because I couldn't fathom how we'd spent
so much money.

The guy to this day doesn't really get what he did wrong, he viewed all his
companies and his own money as piggy banks for each other when they weren't
doing so well. But we were operating on false assumptions. Like we were
profitable now, when in fact we had been profitable, but were no longer.
Because we got rid of the good sales guys.

The mess was much bigger than that, with crazy salaries for mundane jobs and
some employees he knew personally investing in the company as it was
'profitable' but expanding, when in fact they were investing to pay their own
salary until one of his other companies had enough money to pay back an intra-
company loan. Luckily they all got their money back.

Needless to say that period was crazy political for me and very stressful. On
the plus side I made a good friend out of it that I still see today. And he
learnt his lesson and never ignores the books now.

2\. The Tank

A similar, funnier, scenario happened at my mate's old employer where one
founder (CEO) had much bigger equity than the other (CTO). This was a 15-20
person company, kinda just past the startup phase.

The CEO also had a love of tanks. And a tank museum.

The company therefore went into the tank buying business. Which meant the
company couldn't expand how the CTO wanted. This led to office politics, some
supporting the CEO, some the CTO. The CEO eventually promised no more tanks.

A month later a tank accidentally got delivered to the company instead of the
museum. The CEO was away, when he got back in the office the CTO simply took
him to the back and pointed out the window to the tank. He ended up leaving to
start a new venture and took half the staff.

 _TL;DR From personal experience I disagree, politics enter startups when
things go wrong or the CEO has a love of tanks._

~~~
pavel_lishin
Just to make sure there isn't a cultural misunderstanding here... when you say
"tank", you mean the war vehicle that travels on treads, and has a big gun
turret on top?

~~~
cpeterso
Is YC open to tank startups? :)

~~~
pg
Yes, but they should probably start with something smaller.

------
holograham
There are many benefits to working at a large company over a startup. Many of
the items in this thread alone are proof to that. If you have a mortgage, and
2 kids in college then working for a startup that could fold tomorrow is not
exactly the safest bet.

In addition, working at breakneck speed and being completely accountable for
failure is just not within every programmer's capacity. Some need more
structure to be successful. Not everyone is a rock star programmer.

That being said the software industry is changing rapidly. Being a rockstar
makes you more valuable as time goes on. Large s/w companies are having
trouble even maintaining marginal talents and the workforce of programmers is
dwindling. Us hackers will continue to be more valuable than ever.

~~~
KenCochrane
I agree it isn't for everyone. I have 2 kids and a mortgage and I left a high
paying contracting job to take less money at a startup.

I took the chance and I went from dreading work, to really enjoying it. It
proves that money doesn't always buy you happiness.

------
dustinupdyke
"If I need to get anything done I normally do it at night or on the weekend"

Why do so many share this same problem? Anyone should be concerned when this
is the case.

What this says to me is that the current setup is unproductive and needs
changed.

------
sfkaos
Add "the government" to that. After working for 6 years at several large
technology consulting firms on government contracts - because of that
experience I have even less faith on our government getting things done than
ever. On top of the normal big company politics and red tape, government
contracting adds more frustration with its own policy, red-tape, and frankly,
less than enthused employees. It's one thing working for a company that
actually depends on making revenue every quarter - its another working for an
organization that just needs to check a box in order to receive a budget for
the next fiscal year. Never again...

------
d4nt
I prefer startups too, but I disagree on a couple of points:

1\. There are lots of politics at small companies too. There are lots of
politics in any social context. But it probably isn't institutionalised in a
small company. For example, in a big company you might hear the head of one
department instructing people to lie about something in order to manipulate
the people in another department. In a startup that would just be one person
lying to another peerson. And if you're not in the room at the time you would
know it was going on.

2\. It doesn't matter how great your people are, if you have more than about 8
of them you need some structure and process. Companies don't adopt structure
in order to cope with dummy's, but that's a useful side effect.

3\. I doubt companies take on dummies because they've exhausted the pool of
quality people. The pool of quality people is much too big for one company to
exhaust, and it gets replenished every year. But great people are rarely on
the market. Also, people don't deliberately hire dummies, they're just willing
to accept slightly less talent than they themselves have. So, the more layers
you have between the founders and the latest hire, the lower the hiring
quality can get.

------
zwieback
This is so subjective - everyone's experience is different. While I agree that
large companies have a tendency to accumulate overhead and slackers things
have changed significantly over the last few years.

I started out working at several startups and they were orders of magnitude
worse in terms of politics and personality clashes. Also, it was hard
attracting qualified engineers. On the flipside, it was very clear what my
contribution was and I felt very responsible for the success and failure of
the company.

I've been at HP for 11 years now and it's changed from somewhat bloated to
very lean. We've had pretty thorough housecleaning efforts in recent history
as have most mega companies. Bureaucracy has never been a problem where I've
been (I'm sure it's different in other divisions), the smaller project teams
feel a lot like working at startups with the added benefit of very good
equipment, etc.

------
jdelsman
For me, I have come to this realization after making a move to a large company
(Motorola Mobility) from a small one. I have been working for them for two
months, and I am already hating it. Being placed in China puts a whole
additional layer on top of the typical bureaucracy you see in these large
companies. Tons of red tape everywhere!

Needless to say, my experience is very much the same. I see lots of
unnecessary office politics, the inability to get anything done at breakneck
speed as you would at a startup, and for the most part total lack of
innovation. It is really disheartening, and as the OP put it, makes you go
home at the end of the day very disheartened.

------
Zimahl
A lot of good points here but he might not have seen the flip-side, and that's
something that can sour someone on startups real fast.

Here are a few that I've run into:

A lack of funding and the headaches that come with it like downsizing, cost-
cutting, and just the general absence of job-security.

Having a visionary CEO who is also crazy or incompetent or both.

Having a really nice product and it going nowhere because it's either ahead of
it's time or behind.

------
bgurupra
I have seen several such posts on why working in a start-up type environment
is great and I do agree with the points in such posts but what is missing is
any appreciation of the challenges of running a large company vis a vis
running a start up.Comparing a startup to a big company is like comparing a
bullet to a freight train and wondering why the freight train can't go
supersonic like the bullet.

------
cottonseed
That's what I thought, until we took the acquisition exit.

------
suking
I worked at Honeywell as an intern one summer during college. My cubicle-mate
ran a full time truck routing business on the side...

