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Some counter experiences, just based on my own annecdata.

> * You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax.

Working at startups I have never felt less important as an individual. The product is #1 and I only exist as a cog in the machine to produce that product and make the founders money. In a big company I was encouraged to pursue professional development, my professional goals and dreams were catered for and I felt like I could make personal progression.

> * Expect insufficient test automation, lots of regression, and plenty of repetition. Also expect everybody to be an expert that is in a hurry and things in a unique way. Just be patient, politely nod, and just relax.

Again, opposite experience, startups don't have time for test automation whereas big companies generally do.

> * If you don’t like being bored and are highly risk adverse you might find the big company life highly depressing.

I'm often bored at my startup though never lacking for work. It's just that the work can often be monotonous work because the startup doesn't have time to automate it or hire someone to do it. At a startup, its rare that you're encouraged to explore something new that might not work out. There's just not the time or budget.

Maybe it's that employees are some sort of cog about everywhere and test automation is also bad almost everywhere.

Truest comment here. I’m co-founder at tesults.com and the biggest reason we discovered for dropping off the product is because upon integrating they realize their test automation is in such a bad state there’s no need for the service :-) It’s a shame because regression is commonplace. I wrote about why I think it’s done badly on the blog (https://www.tesults.com/blog?id=why-automated-test-projects-...)

I’ve worked at companies with 100k workers down to 10 people companies and the employee is generally a cog everywhere unfortunately but you learn different things. I started out in big companies and learned nothing about the business side of things whatsoever in those years. I did learn solid technical skills and practices though. I think smaller companies are the way to go if you intend to do your own thing one day. Bigger is better earlier in the career to learn technical skills or later on if you need a comfortable/well paying job when raising kids for stability.

I think what you are describing are startups past the early stage. It's the worst of both worlds IMO.

>was encouraged to pursue professional development, my professional goals and dreams were catered for and I felt like I could make personal progression.

I think this is because instead of giving a pay raise, they offer these benefits.

It costs the company nothing.

This is all fantastic advice. I spent the first 26 years of my career working at startups and small companies before taking a job at a big, public tech company last year. This advice is spot-on.

I find that I'm actually working much harder here but my work is more focused and in a single lane. I'm not bouncing around all day between 20 different things. I'm grinding for months on end on one tough, big problem. It's not bad, just...different. The pay is much better here but you are expected to _be_ better.

This all sounds perfect!

At {current_job} it feels like I'm slowly developing faux-ADHD from the "priority 1" task changing, often, multiple times a day. Personal projects are a bit of a respite from it, since I get to focus on the one clear, long-term task for good stretches at a time, but recently I've been too burnt out to do even _more_ programming after yet another hectic day.

I feel like I'm a competent SWE, but the nature of the work means everything is a ticking time bomb. If you're rushing all the time, code quality, testing, and all sorts of other sanity-restoring factors become a distant dream. I'd love to take ownership of a few aspect of a large system and slowly improve whatever I can. But the grass is always greener on the other side, so I'm sure this would come with plenty of negatives too. For one thing I feel like I'm too early into my career to be acting as a faux-CTO and being the go-to for all big tech decisions, infrastructure, etc, as well.

Would you say there is an inflection point at which startups stop being like this? 20, 50, 100, 500 engineers? More?

Sorry for the ramble!

At the beginning of a startup, there are no "big tech decisions" per se, only a whittling down of your problem space and target market. If that can be done with zero technology, all the better.

What gets to be called a "startup" is highly debatable, as some billion-dollar companies have still been called "startups". However, you will only get to be faux-CTO if you get in really early, or start one yourself. Best of luck!

* Things work slowly, so relax.

The extent of this is hard to grasp outside of bigco. At oracle we had layoffs/reorg - no real work was done for ~7 days, and it took 3 months to figure out our new roles/responsibilities. Some people were paid $40k+ in that time period and did very little work.

Things occasionally move very very slow. Twiddle your thumbs and be happy about your huge salary, don't quit like I did!

Seriously. I heard big companies were slow before but I didn’t realize the magnitude of it until I joined one. Most people where I work either only produce real work for anywhere between 40 to 10% of their time. The rest is either filled by busywork or twiddling your thumbs (depending on individuals)

Or meetings, meetings, and... more meetings!

My 2 cents:

As a contractor, charge a lot. They either have budget and want to spend it RIGHT NOW or they don't. The manager engaging you doesn't really care about your daily rate (relatively speaking).

Above comments on automation is spot on. Test suites might be terrible, so the care required to make changes without breaking things is your responsibility, hence the slow pace. What is in your control is the ability to automate your own testing.

Integration with poorly defined APIs is an important skill. You generally won't have another team maintaining and improving a nice API. You will have access to obscure data stores dumped untransformed in the data warehouse from another megacorp's expensive and poorly documented product, possibly with myriad ETL nuances (read: bugs). Learn to work with this and you can extract gold.

If you have a Windows SOE system, embrace Cygwin/similar.

> Learn to work with this and you can extract gold.

Curious if you have any tips for this stuff? My instinct would be to just poke and prod things, writing tests or documenting things as I go along. "I wonder what happens when I do X" -> write a test, get a result. "I wonder what data looks like here" -> examine it, write a summary of what I found. Etc.

I have been a contractor/consultant for the last 7 years. What I've seen when you try and go down that "write a test" path is. Oh there's a 2500 line stored procedure with hardcoded network paths for production data in it. Or, this api only runs on the 2nd Tuesday of the Month but only after 8pm when the day of the month is also even. There's so much do-it-live embedded in the legacy systems it takes months to make enough seams to even test things in isolation outside of production. But, if you can get buy-in to make those changes, then exactly what you are talking about helps a ton.

Love being a contractor. I'm currently unemployed but gave multiple years of savings.

It's such a nice feeling to be inbetween contracts and not have to worry about how you're going to pay bills. I feel like I've only just now gotten to that with my business. Congrats and hopefully not unemployed for too long (unless thats what you want!)

The last 6 months I worked at a large for profit education company all I ever worked on or "released" were simple configuration changes. it was a struggle to find things to fill my day with.

They say "Oracle is where startups go to die" for a reason.

Can't agree to this more. And depending on the size of the company, it might not be just few weeks, things which you would think should have been done in a month might take up to a year. And meanwhile everyone WILL keep talking about moving fast.

People will keep coming in and going out and you would end up have the same conversation with many people many times. And everyone will try to suggest "one change" at a time.

And there is nothing wrong with all this. This is just how big companies work, you cant fast-forward any of it.

I came from multiple startups to a FANG and this advice is really good. Seriously, you’re going to need to relax.

Also I recommend reading “corporate confidential”. I was confused initially why being an excellent engineer who could “deliver” didn’t make me shine at bigco. The book helped me get on a better path.

Also relax.

I found 3 corporate confidential books on Amazon: by Susan Dephillips, by Barath Surendran and by Cynthia Shapiro. Which one do you recommend?

You want the Susan Dephillips one. Very eye opening, if you've never worked in a big corporation before.

Thanks. I have actually for many years and up to 150k head count, but never learned to properly deal with it. Moved onto a mid-sized company which is growing into a conglomerate of its own. I did like Erik Dietrich's Developer Hegemony, but his style of dealing with big co felt a bit too cynical.

https://leanpub.com/developerhegemony

It's worth noting that there is a culture change in some big companies where small teams given more latitude and budget to explore innovative solution (I know because these are the teams I mostly sell to). Also Intrapreneurship is a thing too. Way better place to be in than a medium sized mono product startup to be in if you ask me.

> A lot of my advice here is to just relax, but I hate relaxing.

Hit the nail on the head with that one.

I had the same experience and the comment about relaxing resonates with me.

Coming from the startup to the big company I could not understand why people leave the office at 5pm. There would be another few hours to work.

Also lots of meetings.

As the previous commenter said. Relax.

I guess you will have a broad skill set from your background and actually in big Corp the nice thing is that with this broad skill set That you can engage in so many different projects. And it is tempting to do so. But you only have this much time a day, and it will not be easy to accelerate your pace. This frustration can be bad for your mental health.

So my advice is relax. But also don’t forget the thoughts you had when joining the big company in the first months. Maybe keep a journal. Because you probably had good ideas but might get overwhelmed by the complexity of the big Corp.

If you have not read the “Accelerate” book, I would recommend this as well.

Also you can observe Conway’s Law in its beauty.

Why would I find it depressing if I’m risk averse? You sound like the only risk is getting fired for a random reason, which could also happen at a smaller corp.

I think they meant risk-adverse, like able to tolerate risks well.

Both adverse and averse mean pretty much the same thing (thanks English language), but otherwise you are completely correct.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/adverse-or-ave...

I guess I was thinking of “well-versed”, thanks.

I am so used to using the phrase risk adverse because is the more common phrase in my military side job. In the real world the common phrase is risk averse.

The first means a personality type that doesn’t perform risk analysis normally or does but simply disregards high risk concerns. For example it doesn’t make sense to jump out of an airplane or leap into combat. There is a preference for people who can weigh those risks and override the common sense factor that results in terror. In the business world this could mean investing your life savings into a start up idea knowing you might likely fail with nothing to show for it.

The second more common phrase refers to opposite personality types that cannot proceed in the face of uncertainty. These people are terrified to make a decision where the outcomes are unclear and thus hesitate waiting for increased certainty or for someone else to make that decision.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)

My personal approach to these terms is to simply make a damn decision even with insufficient evidence, because then you are at least doing something. If you later discover your decision is wrong then simply shift direction in the face of new evidence. People who sit there waiting for clarity, feels like an eternity in hell, makes me sad.

Well that all sounds terribly depressing.

This nails it.

> At a startup you are actively changing the world.

That sounds very exciting. Can you point to one startup that's changing the world?

SpaceX?

SpaceX was founded almost 20 years ago and has 8,000 employees. That is not a startup (today) by any reasonable definition.

Are they though? They're almost 18 years old at this point, so I feel like they don't really count as a startup.

How old and how large has really nothing to do with being a startup or not . It just means a fledgling business whose revenues are expected to change rapidly and is developing a product/ business .

This is in contrast to stable or blue chip like companies who have stable revenues and their product lines are very well established.

The distinction is important for two groups of people .

a) investors - Risks and rewards are fundamentally different , therefore valuation methods are also different t you would use something like a Discounted Cash flow for stable corp you might look at IP, ARR , DAU or any number of other metrics for a startup whose revenues are not stable enough to use DCF etc

b) employees - change or innovation is far more deeply grained culture in startups , What worked yesterday may not work today, that requires different mindset to be successful at

Amazon , Uber are still startups despite what you think about their sizes , ages and current revenues . Building a AWS is only possible if you can completely rethink what is that you sell .

I didn't take that literally - rather that at a startup, most of what you do has an immediate and obvious impact on the company.

Something tells me this question is not asked in good faith.

Stripe

There are legit startups out there that do change the world. Most of them are not companies that you've ever heard of.

I think that companies that change the world satisfy the following criteria: 1 - their work is very hard to replicate. Not impossible, but it would take a competitor a long time to reproduce their product or service. 2 - people would notice a tangible impact on their life if the company disappeared tomorrow.

We won't know which small startups right now are and aren't until several years from now.

All of the big cos right now that have changed the world were a startup not long ago. Yes, not all of the startups will succeed, but there will be yet another trillion dollar company some day which is today somewhere in the realm of early stage startups.

"just relax" good advice.

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I feel this paints a far uglier picture than reality. In my limited experience (been with two fortune 500 companies, one of then in the top 10), you can expect maybe one of these issues(or two if you're really unlucky).