Why You Need To Work For A Big Company

Its funny, my advice would be the exact opposite. Don't join a big company if you are the kind of person who's ethusiastic and ambitious about what he or she does. It'll more than likely crush you. It'll feel like you're back in 2001, your co-workers will likely be average to poor, you won't have a choice in technology, you'll notice that being a shill is more important than being good.

It's probably worth distinguishing between a big company where you're working on the core business (i.e. an engineering company) and a big company where you're working in a pure cost centre, like IT. I suspect that may explain the diverging views of the article and some of the commenters here.

Be careful though. Even when the money, perks, and coworkers are good there are still serious risks to working at a big company. Certain aspects can make it a soul crushing endeavor that will burn you out and destroy your motivation to do anything software related (which can significantly hamper your efforts to move on to something less soul crushing). This is especially dependent on your personality. There's a reason why turnover is so high in this industry and it's not just because people are jumping from awesome experience to even awesomer experience.

The main argument for working at a big company, in my eyes, isn't on the list:

You need a big company to work on a big product.

If you want to work on something as complex, massive, multidisciplinary, and grand as, for example, the space shuttle, small companies aren't an option. Sure, you might be called upon to learn fortran, and there will be underperformers and politics. But the engineering challenges can be mind-blowing anyway.

I'm reminded of one of the characters in Snow Crash who loved her study so much she would go anywhere to practice it. Sometimes big companies are like that. A dead sexy product can make it all worth it.

There plenty of poorly run, large companies, that are filled with people that aren't that smart, bright, or motivated. Many of these companies don't have great perks, but you might get some job stability out of it.

If you are going to work for a big company, choose wisely.

I think there's one big thing missing here : the potential to meet future collaborators. A large company is the ideal place to find other people with skills and burning desires to do other things. You can find out if they have these skills by observing their output while someone else is paying. When it comes time to form your own, you should at least have a good shortlist of people to invite on board.

It depends on what you value.

The problem with being at a really large company is that it can be extremely difficult to find any kind of self-worth. You have to try and chase it but there will be so much red tape at every doorway that you'll have to find some other way around it. You may be in a huge department. You may be doing stuff that is only seen internally. You'll spend time hacking to rebuild something crappy to prove it's value. You're wedged into a system (slowly). The processes are already set. You'll learn a fair amount of things, but nowhere near what you'd probably learn at an energetic startup or doing your own thing.

The absolute best thing will be the people. You'll meet some outstanding folks... Potentially the kind that want to start something different.

It will be interesting for the first 6 months to a year, and then you'll become pretty bored. Unless you just don't care and you're riding the wave.

That self-worth thing is a pretty big deal. The majority of people enjoy being 'comfortable.' Finding the comfort that just pays the bills. That's great. That's where big companies shine. I'd rather chill on the edge being a leader revolving around building something new. But it took me joining a large company to learn that.

So, really, just follow you're heart. You'll learn. Nobody can argue that being a bad thing.

I especially like point #7: "You get a baseline. Then you go and try to do it better."

One possible interpretation: "learn as much as you can about your enemy, then use that knowledge against them." :-)

It really depends which large company you work for. My very first job was at an average large company and it was rather soul crushing. I currently work at a huge media company that has a terrific work atmosphere/culture. I think the difference between the two companies was a bankruptcy. The later company went bankrupt, projects were canceled, the hackers in the room figured they would be laid off any day and started working on whatever they felt like. Clients caught wind of what the hackers were developing and started buying in. The upper management saw all of this and didn't dare mess with it.

I worked for a very large company with ties to the Bush administration that everyone loves to hate.

Here is my take, and I would never want to work at a company of that size again...

1) I can say I did learn a lot during my tenure there, however, they were such a huge collection of edge cases that not much was directly applicable to anywhere else I have worked. I can say that I got a good grasp on not breaking large complex systems though.

2) I found this to not be the case, and this was very disappointing to me. When I started there I was expecting to be surrounded by the best and brightest on a mission. I found that in the case of this company, in my group(say around 100-150 people) it was 5% of the people doing 95% of the work, surrounded by people content to do just enough to not get fired.

3) semi true, I do maintain contact with several people there.

4) Perks- NO NO NO NO NO NO!!! Benefits at this place sucked. After I left(2008) the company suspended raises for everyone for at least 18 months. While I was able to change titles to a much higher "paygrade", the company did not want to ever make my salary reflect the title.

5) Probably the biggest reason I never want to work at a large company again. Most managers were promoted beyond their competency, so decisions were made based on how much power they could wield and not what was best for the company. A great example is how they would not allow certain blackberrys to connect to the enterprise server because one of the managers thought the scroll wheel was a toy. iPhones were banned because it took > 1 hour to cut off your access if you were terminated. Thats right folks, exchange/Phone policy dictated by the fact that the company thinks they will probably fire you and they cant cut off your access quickly enough.

6) true

7) Absolutely. Im now at a small company(~150 employees) and the lack of all the crap I mention above has drastically improved my well being.

Best reason: going home at 6 o'clock and rarely getting called on nights and weekends unless you volunteer for it.

1. You learn an awful lot. You get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. You see lots of very good ideas (like proper source control) and some not so good ideas (like how not to motivate people).

For good ideas, I think this depends on what you mean by "large." A small company company that has been around for a long time, and possibly grown into a medium- or large-sized company during that time, acquires a high level of expertise in its particular problems. It's really an education to see the technical solutions that emerge from years of accumulated experience in that kind of environment. However, after companies get really large, they devolve back towards mediocrity, because the prevailing management mentality is that technical excellence does not scale. Executives four or five levels away from the front lines want to feel in control. If they aren't in control, nobody is in control. If nobody is control, the company drifts aimlessly. And the executives aren't in control unless the people on the front lines are predictable and interchangeable. There's a flaw in that logic, but it's natural for executives to feel that way. Technical excellence (except in the empty sense that everyone claims) also means that management can't solve technical problems by itself, because management's only methods for solving technical problems are managerial: ramp up hiring, hire contractors, outsource, etc. Empowering management means organizing the company around the most common technologies, the most common practices, and the most common quality of developer. From that point of view, technical mediocrity is a feature, not a bug. There's no need to learn mediocrity first-hand: you can learn it from books and blogs, and from there you will quickly match or exceed it.

For bad ideas, I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't think there's much benefit to seeing ideas fail. Some things are obviously good or bad, and some things you need to see play out in practice, but in my opinion, the non-obvious things you need to see play out in practice are usually sensitive to context and specifics. They might work poorly in a large company but well in a small company, or poorly in one large company and well in another large company. Scrum, for instance, turns out to be a poor fit (in my opinion) for the engineering department I work in. If I try to predict whether Scrum will or won't work in another situation, however, I will fall back on common sense unless there are particular parallels to the situation I observed.

2. You get to work with lots of clever people.

Surprisingly true, probably because of the exact reasons he stated. However, the better the tech economy, the more the best people feel confident leaving.

4. They have lots of perks. I do miss the canteen, the sports gym and the other 'extras'. And that week's 'training' in Amsterdam at the company's expense. That was a lot of fun!

Not always true. Many big companies have no perks at all, or insultingly crappy ones. Mine won't even provide decent coffee -- we have a bunch of coffee fiends who simply don't drink coffee at work. It's better to have a coffee house nearby than to have a company canteen. (Also keep in mind that if you're a lower-level resource, big companies may compensate for lax productivity standards by paying more attention to when you're in the office, which makes it a bad idea to go out for coffee on a regular basis.)

As for training, that depends, too. Sometimes big companies won't pay for any training except overpriced training in proprietary software, and then only one or two people get it. You can encounter cases where the company will only pay for (e.g.) introductory Oracle training, but will only pay for training for its most senior resources. The introductory training isn't offered to junior resources, and the company won't pay for advanced training for the senior resources, so nobody ever gets trained. (And you'll never know whether this is on purpose, or simply due to stupidity.) I was going to get flown to expensive official SAP training halfway across the country, but then (thank God) I managed to avoid working with SAP. Result? No training of any kind for me, even if it's half the price. Unless I want to get a Master's degree, that is, in which case I have a lot of leeway. It seems ridiculous that the company will pay for a Master's degree but won't shell out a thousand bucks for a conference, but apparently that's not unusual. The rules are often bizarre and counterproductive.

1. You learn an awful lot. --This is no different from a small company. Nothing that stands out to be a reason to work for a large company.

2. You get to work with lots of clever people. --Are you nuts? A good percent of large companies are made up of "resources" who chug on the framework created by few good men(mostly when the team/company was smaller). Usually an offshore vendor is already established and politicizing the project.

3. You become part of a large diaspora/community. -- The explanation makes more sense if you are working in a large non-tech company (say Ford,Toyota plant). But again not a reason that stands out as unique to a Large company.

5. you learn the art of politics - You are crushed by the number game (with equally competent(or otherwise)) competing for promotions, that loving to lick ass becomes more of survival than a favorite activity.

6. You have time to reflect. -It is not necessarily slow. It is fast paced repetitive, enough to numb you.You ponder about the life in general (and get into depression?) (this doesn't apply to the crowd that join the large company to live the retired life)

"You might also appreciate the relative security, the calm and the chance to get your life in order. Once you join a startup, it is generally going to be permanent 'seats of you pants' mode." -wtf is that about?

7. You get a baseline. Then you go and try to do it better. -how is this a reason to work for a large company only.

When you work in a large company you have to deal with many more people than a small one.

For example in a small company, if you have issues with pay, you go speak to the boss/owner, or if you're big enough, the book-keeper/accountant type. In a large company there will be a whole department for your problem - be it HR helpdesk, your local accounts/payroll clerk, etc.

In the big company, you should make the effort to learn who is who and what do they do. You will soon start working out what qualities these people have that make them great, average, or terrible at their job.

In a small company, if you hire someone with the wrong qualities, at a pivotal time in your growth, it will be like contracting a disease.

Big company experience shows you lots of mistakes, which can be covered over by co-workers, PR department, caught by the QA team hour before shipping, etc. etc. If you don't get exposure to these sorts of mistakes, whilst they may not kill your startup, they will cause you some big-time stress. Stress in those quantities is not good for the survival of your business.

You can, however, mitigate some of these risks by having good mentors around, and hiring smart and experienced staff at the beginning. Successful startups like Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. didn't survive on hiring graduates alone. And if they did, they were lucky or smart enough to hire the right people in the right roles.

Two things you will learn:

- How not to do stuff.

- That you need to get out ASAP to protect your brain from rotting

I don't "need" to do anything.

Big companies let you fail and learn from your mistakes on their dime...which later helps you succeed on your dime!

I worked in a few startups before joining a few large companies since then. The truth is that there is an incredible variety.

Not all large organizations are the same and it may be very different from department to department. I have worked with people of truly amazing technical expertise and work ethics in a large organization that relied heavily on heavy transaction loads. The cost of downtime was know to the minute and many operations were very sensitive to performance, the contribution of the technical teams to the business were known and recognized. Everything that was central to its operation was done in house all the way down to network protocols. This environment made technical excellence an important aspect of selecting employees. Less performing employees were moved to other areas of the business, or just not kept after their probation period.

I have also seen other organizations where you contact your technical team when you order the coffee for the press conference where you'll announce the new product they're supposed to build. When technical expertise is not well regarded; I've seen less talented people. But the machine was still working thanks to its traditions and established systems, at least if you're attentive you get to learn how to build resilience. I have done great and exciting work in startups, I have also seen countless numbers small companies with low levels of expertise and professionalism.

    most startups reckon you are past it if you are over 23

Is this true?

Like most advice in life/money/startups doesn't it really depend?

I've never worked at a big company. I started and mostly failed at my first venture out of college. 2nd one did well. Never got a real job. Now don't need a real job, I love the one I've created for myself.

Why should I go work for a big company? To work more hours for little to no upside?

I can see some advantages....just not enough to make me quit working for myself.

I agree. Having worked at CNET and AOL, the two were like a short-term intensive training course in working culture. Lots to like, lots to hate, and all really useful.

That being said I could only stay at either for a short while, because the lack of progress just doesn't sit well with me.

But, I did like the experience and given the choice to do it all over, would repeat them.

I started out at a huge professional services firm. I only spent a year there, but I am really glad for that year. It was an introduction to the harsh realities of the work world that most people deal with day to day.

The startup that I went to work for afterwards was completely different in most ways. However, our clients were large enterprises like my former employer, and I was able to understand the pain many of our client contacts were going through while trying to do something that was obviously the right decision for the organization (buying our product) but dealing with red tape, politics, and morons in the approval process.

Not to mention, if I'd started out in a startup without dealing with the idiocy and creative vacuum of a behemoth organization, I am sure I wouldn't have appreciated the opportunity of working in a small, intelligent meritocracy nearly as much.

Some good points - it would be easy to counter, but what I would really like to see is an empirical study of successful ventures started by founders with a big company background. That would be a more meaningful way to understand how the experience translates.

I've worked for big companies with training budgets, lavish perks and benefits, also for startups that went bankrupt. I learned things in both situations. You can always learn something in almost any situation, and come away the better for it in the long run.

I just joined a 70 people company from a company with 50K employees globally....and loving it here.

At my past company I worked on an important module, it was well tested, everyone loved it. After 2 months it was on the 'path' to be released after 2 months. At this company I worked on something last week and we are looking to release it in 2 weeks (with enough QA).

People work in mid-small companies. Big companies have smart people but they get LAZY and eventually the culture builds up on you.

It is important to work for a big company and get exposed to the culture......as these are the people you might make products for, these are people who may put money in your company, etc. I would RUN after spending 2 years.

Working for a large but still quickly growing company has been, for me, the best of both worlds. There's still a lot of upside in stock options and in career path because of the growth. You get to dabble in politics and you have a large community of people to learn from and keep in contact with in the future.

And usually, these companies are not mired in the large and unwieldy bureaucracy that is common in large and established companies. i.e. companies like Facebook, Zynga, Google 5 years ago, etc.

However, my experience is limited to two big-but-growing companies, one startup, and one small but completely dysfunctional. Too small a sample size for definitive generalization.

I have a hard time with articles like this that generalize over such a broad and variable base. Some big companies are great, some are terrible, and most are in between. And once you're in that big company, a lot depends on who you work for and what your group does, so you'll find that some areas are great to work in, some are terrible and most are in between.

And what makes this even more infuriatingly variable for the generalizer is that it is unlikely you and I would even agree on which of these companies, or departments within companies, are the great or terrible ones. So much depends on who you are, what you want and what you need.

I joined a very large software company almost 4 years ago, knowing that it probably wasn't for me... but you can only know for sure if you try these things.

As for the stated advantages? I don't see them here. I'm considering starting the New Year by resigning.

1. You learn a lot: Yes, I'd agree although what you learn might be a lot of internal architectures an systems which aren't applicable outside. I'd agree that you need to experience a big company to get a proper perspective on the rest of your career though

2. Smart people: kind of, though there's maybe 10% of the developers here who even touch a computer outside of work... far less do any sort of personal programming projects or reading.

3. Large community: true, I've made good friends here and some international contacts though I'm not sure they will come to anything. I came from a fairly lonely road of research/PhD studies and wanted the experience of working in a team. Unfortunately, my "team" is now mostly remote and, no matter what anyone says, it's not the same as working with the people in the cubes around you.

4. They have lots of perks: No! Our company doesn't even provide tea or coffee. We get health insurance but that's standard for most/all software companies here. Bonuses are small enough that you can effectively forget about them. There's no training budget or internal courses (except on internal processes).

5. You learn the art of politics: No, not necessarily. I've had a lot more office politics in the small companies I've worked for. And regardless of the company, I don't play politics. I'm friendly but not fake, I say what I think and I do what I say.

6. Time to reflect: That's part of the reason why I'm still here. The work is easy, standards are low and hours are flexible (and bosses generally ignorant as long as the job gets done) so I can work on side-projects in my spare time. The problem is that the lazy work and general depression at work spills over into your side-projects. So even though I have the time I've recently lost the motivation to do much in the way of proper side-project work.

7. You get a baseline: Exactly. I firmly believe that you can't bitch and complain about something until you've tried it.

I've worked for:

- a large military contractor - consulted for many clients who were just starting their own startup - a 150 person internet company - a small 10 person website

I just turned 30 and feel like I've experienced most of the different work environments out there. I agree with the original article, I think most people would benefit from spending a few years, maybe right out of college, at a large company.

At the larger companies, I could spend a month really getting to learn a language. I wouldn't be able to do that at a startup.

All very good points, in line with my own experience. I skipped university and went to work for a big software company instead. I've transferred internally half a dozen times in six years, with half of that time spent in management. I've continually learned new things, and couldn't have got a better education anywhere.

Now, however, I'm ready to do my own thing. Thanks to the experience I've gained, I think I'll succeed, too.

In small companies, you work like Rambo: one person deals with a few products and wearing different hats. In big companies, you work like a bow in a machine: you are easily replaceable with someone with similar qualifications/experiences.

These are exactly the reasons I ultimately decided to work where I am today. I think it's worthwhile to reflect on these every now and then, because it's really easy to lose site of them in face of the politics and daily toil.

I have every one of these things at my current company and I work at a 100 person company.

I'm sorry, but I can't take advice from someone whose twitter handle is @JavaPDF. :)