As someone who has spent a couple of decades in mostly enterprise environments, I assure you this article is largely correct - but it's not as bad as it seems. I'm reminded of the time I went to a meetup in Silicon Valley, talking about selling to the enterprise, and hearing a bunch of people shocked at how slow everything is, the scope of failures, and how the enterprise people must be really stupid and lazy.

Nah. Enterprise people are just as smart and hardworking as startups. But they have much bigger problems. Just as it's harder to turn a battleship than a speedboat, the scale matters. One thing I pointed out to people at the meetup... if you heard of a startup doing $50m annually, you'd think they were big and successful, right? I've worked on several different projects that size in the enterprise, and they tend to be just a sideline in some behemoth doing tens of billions of dollars (or more) of business a year.

One thing I often say about the enterprise, and what makes it different from startups - in the enterprise, it's more important to not be wrong than to be right. This encourages cautious behavior. Missed opportunities are better than disasters. Anyone with real experience in the enterprise has been on a proper death march. They've seen just how wrong things can get. Put a couple of years of labor in, handcuffed to a shambling corpse of a zombie project, and your attitude toward failure changes.

The flip side, though, and this is awesome, is that you can work on really BIG things. Much bigger than any startup is tackling. That's fun.