Trying something again
blog.cynically.moe
blog.cynically.moe
> Ironically, this sort of cross functional work is highly valued, but if you're drawn to this path, you'll find yourself doing much more cutting through red tape than real work.
I find myself in this position. I've been with my company since it was tiny (10 employees total) to now (~150). I have functioned as a generalist for most of that time and I'm somewhat divided between architecture and coordination efforts versus actual coding. The original core dev team has mainly become the backend team and we have a newer frontend team. I recently shifted from the backend team to frontend, and now I'm able to help bridge between them so I'm hoping to help avoid some of those siloing pitfalls.
A quicker way to find this may be by popping up a level and asking, "who do I really want to help, and then what product do they need?"
That lack of a "who," in the north star turns companies into a race to the bottom. The "why," implied by the "who" needs to be there as well, but find some people you like or admire and build something they want. It's a different class of problem than working for a large org where most of big corp products are just about leverage and optimization, instead of desire and growth.
Who do you want to help?
Not taking anything away from the author, just sharing a personal anecdote.
* It's a small startup-like team with a specific mission and visibility/management backing to achieve it, which also allows me to be more of a generalist.
Not sure if this is a reference, but this is a catch phrase of a character from the monogatari anime series. [1]
That being said it's an interesting post. I mostly feel the same way but kind of dropped out of tech altogether after 2 bad experiences at $BIGCO companies. Maybe a startup would be a better experience for me.
I noticed it in the reverse direction: once $BIGCO employees (often "big catches") come to a growing-from-small-to-midsize startup, some level of political gamesmanship is introduced. If your department has a manager hire with a bad case of the politics, you and your soon-to-be ex-colleagues may be in for a wild ride.
It only makes sense that, if you extrapolate that behavior to the source where it came from, you'd see a lot more of it. There are some big companies that seem to be exceptions to this rule, but there are much more that prove it.
Yes, but I would not be happy, and while my take home is lower my lifetime earnings have been a couple of orders of magnitude higher (the sum, not most years of course).
But it's less the money than the fun.
This has been my exact experience while working for various SV-based $BIGCORPS
I still hold out hope than some day someone will crack how to structure large organisations in a way that eliminates or minimises the politics and dysfunction while retaining the economies of scale. I feel like this will require a radically different approach, with innovative legal and technical structures to enforce the right incentives.
I checked, and it looks like the author now works for Salesforce. I wonder how the internal culture compares