Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

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"because you will learn that inside a major corporation you are nothing but a cog in the machine"

I bet you'll learn a helluva lot more than that.

I'm not sure why there's such a negative undercurrent in this forum regarding larger organizations. Maybe negative experiences, maybe just heresay. Of course, the culture will be very different from a startup. But there's lots of good stuff, too.

I've worked in quite a few large companies, but now mostly small ones. Invariably, one of my small clients runs into an issue that none of their 30 employees has ever encountered before. So they try to figure it out. Until I say, "Here's how you do that..." Am I a genius? No. I've just seen the exact same thing handled very well in several large companies. Also (invariably), one of my small clients has to hire a manager of <you name it> who has vast experience in a large company. They always bring solutions to lots of problems that no one has ever imagined there.

Don't discount a large organization. It may be weighed down by its size, but you'll be able to witness LOTS of interesting stuff that you'll see nowhere else.

I'd be glad to list a few of the other things I have learned while working for large corporations.

(Lesson 1) Inside a large corporation, progress is impeded not by the intellect or imagination but by bureaucracy.

(Lesson 2) Corporations will stab you in the back. I experienced my first layoff when I was 23. I accepted a position in July of 2006 and was told in September of 2006 that my job would be gone in February of 2007.

Brent, from your own profile:

"After working for several miserable years in the banking and investment industries as a trust analyst and an equity trader..."

Sorry you have had such negative experiences with large organizations (although in that industry, I'm not surprised). Welcome to the hacker's life. I sure expect that this career will go a lot better for you that that one.

My experience is obviously very different from yours. I have worked in many large and small companies, and each has had its own pros and cons. I have seen some of the coolest technology in very large organizations and have also seen the worst office politics you can imagine in 20 person companies.

I understand you sourness; just try to not let your negative experience turn into a false generalization that could limit opportunities for yourself or others.

It could be because this is a rather self-selecting group. People who'd be happy at a large organization tend not to spend all their time on startups.

I interned at a large (~6000 employee) company in high school, and a mid-size (~150 employee) company as a freshman in college. I found that the people there were generally happy - quite a bit happier than the average person in the startups I've worked at, actually. I also found that I would not be happy at a big corporation. I did well enough at my projects, found the work itself reasonably interesting, but it was not fulfilling in the sense that I could do it for a long period of time and not regret the time spent on it.

I interned at Yahoo's research lab for 11 months last year, and it gave me some idea of a BIG high-tech company. Yes, I did experience quite a bit of the bureaucracy and sluggish speed of large corporations, but this was minimal compared to the fun I had, especially with the group of people I met and worked with.

I'm specifically thinking in terms of future opportunities. Would you, as a hiring manager, be more interested in a candidate with obvious experience at well known names in the industry, or at startups that, possibly, no longer exist when the person comes around to interview with you?

All other things being equal, the big "brand name" company is better. Seeing Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft on a resume is a big green flag saying to take another look, something that a small company won't get you.

Again, that's all other things being equal - if the line item is "Yahoo Inc. - Performed performance testing and bugfixes on the company's intranet calendar" vs. "Defunct Startup Inc. - Designed and built the entire UI of our company's sole product", the startup candidate is more appealing, because they've done more. (That was roughly the difference in responsibilities between my big-company internship and small-company internship, BTW; though the big company is a lot less well-known than Yahoo.) Of course, this requires that the company you're applying to gets few enough applications that they can actually read each one, instead of just skimming for keywords and places of employment. That's perhaps another reason why startup-people tend to keep working in startups, and big-company people tend to keep working in big companies.

Another factor: there's diminishing returns in brand recognition. If you've already got Yahoo on your resume, I'll be taking another look anyway, and so you don't get much additional benefit from having Google as well. Meanwhile, if there's another candidate who also has Yahoo but also had significant responsibilities at a startup, I'd probably give the position to him, because he has a bigger breadth of experience.

(At my last employer, one of the parts of my resume that my boss picked out as particularly good was that I had a really wide variety of experience - I'd previously done desktop UIs, I'd done websites, I'd done build automation & testing, I'd done network programming, and I'd done Intranet calendars and such.)

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