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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Larger company that is trying to keep startup mojo is special kind of hell - mostly due to ugly politics that emerges. You cant manage small group of people the same way as big one and vice versa.

> The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things.

I dont think we should devalue maintenance and maintenance programmers. I know it is popular, especially among those who want to convince programmers to go to startups, but that is exactly what it is.

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"Larger company that is trying to keep startup mojo is special kind of hell - mostly due to ugly politics that emerges. You cant manage small group of people the same way as big one and vice versa."

My company is on that path. It's merging the bad parts of startups like overambitious deadlines and lack of organization with the bad parts of big companies like bureaucracy and lack of flexibility. Management seems happy but from a worker's point of view we have relentless pressure to deliver mixed with a huge layer of politics. It has become really unpleasant over the last few years.

"lack of organization" and "bureaucracy" ... You work for Vogons.

We have a lot of people who can say "no" but much less people who say "yes" and help to achieve things.

For anyone interested in the importance of maintenance I highly recommend the article “Hail the maintainers (Innovation is overvalued)” and the Freakonokics podcast episode that builds on the article. I gained a new appreciation for maintenance from them.

[1]https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-...

[2]http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/

omg, yes and yes! Large companies should assume the fact that they're large and maintenance engineers are my heroes.

These folks are in the hardest spot in large orgs because they perform hidden feats of heroics all the time, yet they're typically only noticed when things go wrong.

Just because you're working on a system that is already in place doesn't mean that you can't do new things. The refactoring is "new work"

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