A megacorp is not your dream job

>If you quit, remember that they will have forced you to sign an NDA and a non-compete.

Not really likely considering there is a huge revolving door between all the major tech companies. There is also a risk I get hit by a car on the way to work.

>You will probably be much happier at a small to mid-size company. The “dream job” megacorps have sold you on is just good marketing.

Actually I've worked on interesting, highly used stuff at megacorps in mature work environments, and was paid much more than most random small companies would. The concept of a "dream job" doesn't exist, neither in big companies or small companies, IMO.

>They could hurt you, and they could make you hurt others.

I could just leave and get another job at any time. I don't understand why this author is so paranoid.

You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or influence.

This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-specialized with no meaningful holistic task.

Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.

I read that Airbnb blogpost recently about moving to react native and back and I can only imagine the amount of hours of human life that were wasted in meetings alone makes Kafka's novels look harmless, why do people do this to themselves.

The FAANG "megacorp" was my absolute favourite job. I learned more, had more impact, made more money, and boosted my own career further than anywhere else I've worked.

Large corporations are not the Evil Co. from your Saturday morning cartoons. Yes, they have immense power, but from what I've seen unethical behaviour and treating employees like shit are more common in non-tech or smaller, dead end, companies.

The company rankings, seem to correlate by how much they spend on ads and recruiting campaigns.

But what's strange, to me at least, is that FAANG companies also dominate those list - despite the fact that they only have very small satellite offices here in my country (in Scandinavia), where they work on quite niche products / problems.

I always found it a bit curious, when talking to highly motivated and talented young people in tech, that basically dream about joining companies like Microsoft, knowing fully well that they'll be working on some Office 365 feature - probably fixing bugs.

Microsoft, on their side, can pick and choose among talent - because they'll get run down with applicants either way. They could hire good students with Master's Degrees, make them janitors, and still it wouldn't even dent their reputation - because kids will blindly follow lists as mentioned above, and the dream of a prestigious employer on their CV.

The amount of respect I afford these people is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes them to say where they worked or went to school. Went to MIT and don’t ever manage to bring it up in a conversation and I have to learn it from someone else? Massive respect, but they usually mention it in the first 30 seconds.

And I'm working with really nice people.

Maybe it's my imposter syndrome speaking, but I always think that I've pulled a fast one by getting this far in my career without being exposed as an incompetent.

Certainly, there's someone X levels above me who doesn't know who I am and doesn't care, but that really doesn't affect my life.

Pros: I feel much less like a cog in a big machine at the smaller organization. My pay went up significantly because they actually wanted some of my unique skill set, and just before the end of the year I got a project of importance from the R&D director, with the VP of product development explaining the longer term importance of the project. My manager is pretty hands off, so I can totally get away with building my skills when he thinks I'm working on short term projects -WFH helps too ;)

Cons: more variation in people. The megacorp had more standard cooperative folks, but I think some people I work with now are trying to protect their fiefs at the expense of my work. I'm slowly learning to do their jobs though hehehe...

At the megacorp (a big name you've heard of), I was in a huge side office. They made some nice sounding efforts to train me, but my time was billed by the hour (standard in the industry), so every hour learning something was an hour i had to make up later. I was moved between random projects with vacancies, so when I did learn something I'd have to shelve it for months or years until the funding situation or other variables aligned. My own ideas: there was a way to get funding, but it wasn't much and nobody above the director level cared if my idea worked, even if it impressed the company's anointed experts. I was an experienced engineering hire, was there for a few years.

I'm pretty happy with my new job! The industry is renewable energy, which makes me feel better than my old corporate jobs on the oil/defense side of the moral spectrum. I got lucky! We'll see how this goes. At the old job people came and went a lot, so I have reason to believe I can go back if the new thing flames out.

My two cents.

- salary and perks are nice - people are smart - people are understanding

I don't solve interesting problems, mostly just run of the mill internal tools web app.

The only downside is that I can't do it remotely (this will be an onsite job, after this pandemic ends, said the management), or from another country. I'd love to just go to another country (my country of origin, or my wife's country of origin) and work there, but with US salary.

I'd love to have financial independence, spending time with my families which live apart from me. Thinking of starting my own, but SaaS software is extremely competitive and risky, and probably won't be making money.

Btw I see a lot of hostility among the comments. I myself actually appreciate the post, thank you for the author. I do think a lot about ethical concerns when applying to companies, and I'm happy to have found one that I have no problem with.

it's easy to say money isn't everything. but you don't really need to work very long to retire with that kind of money. if you're single (even in the bay area) it should be relatively easy to live a fairly cushy life on 100k$/year spending. that means you can pocket 180k$/year in savings. if you invest it, and the stock market returns 7%/year on average[1], you will be a millionaire in 5 years. it's one of the lowest risk ways for a young engineer to accumulate wealth. definitely within reach to retire in your early 40s, depending on how much money you want to spend.

[1] no investment is guaranteed but the stock market has been very reliable in the past with a long enough timeline.

The goal is to make so much money you can save it, and retire early. Or if you're doing the family thing put your kids into a fantastic college. I have no qualms about working on a product which is absolutely boring, and I have no real influence over.

If they tell me to stare at a wall for $400 an hour I'll be the best wall starer .

However I found that working for a Fortune 500 company to be both rewarding and comforting. I have been doing it for over two decades. I see the winds of change all the time but I also see incredible people I would have never met otherwise, new technologies that only were present because being so large we had teams for everything, and the opportunities expanded when working with large vendors who did not just ignore us or take us for granted.

Are there issues working in a company which probably lost more in a backroom than they pay you. Sure. The key is knowing how to manage yourself and know the boundaries of your environment so that you don't because replaceable cog.

You think megacorps are bad, well have you considered the gargantuan that is your Federal or State level government. Here are countless agencies and officials who supposedly are there to look out for you and all the others but no one actually holds them to that. You can try but you are not going to get far. Hiding behind Sovereign Immunity and even Qualified Immunity; which applies to all officials not just police; when they do something wrong or even illegal. Play side games with grant money to fund each other or writing contracts to hire friends and family for big money. No, corporations when they get large can be a threat to you if you work for them but government is a threat to everyone but who do you run to first and point fingers at someone else for them to act upon?

Corporations are not evil. They are a byproduct of this environment we live in. If I have an issue with the OP, is that he thinks his ideals as some sort of divine atheistic moral code we should follow. Morals are subjective and relative. It's dangerous to try shaming people because you think your ideas have some kind of "higher morality". That's basically what religion is, and it ended up killing (and still is) lots of people.

Since then my preference definitely shifted towards smaller companies so I can get more experience working on greenfield projects.

What is the biggest perk, to complement the big salary? My colleagues. I worked with really amazing people, and learnt a lot from them.

Did I end up in the only few good spots at the company and spoke mostly with people in the remaining good ones? Statistically unlikely. I'm aware there are rotten parts, but I don't think it's the majority.

Megacorp is easily the best. That pay of nearly $500k/year is actually really really great.

Retiring at 50 instead of 60 is pretty good dream job.

This is the highlight of the article to me. We software engineers are paid a lot of money and gifted many cushy benefits to ignore the negative impact of our work. Just read some of the other responses in this thread for examples!

My question to those who feel this way: do you need that second property? That new car? If you were less insulated from the negative externalities, would you make the same choice?

Not all of us are driven solely by a paycheck. I know I could be earning 2-3x times more at a company like Facebook, but I chose not to because I want to sleep at night. As I have gotten older I've started to learn what actually makes me happy verses what I am told should make me happy. Endless consumption and unfettered capitalism do not make me happy. I can achieve the standard of living that keeps me fed, sheltered, entertained, and saving for retirement without working for a megacorp that hurts people less privileged than myself.

Because they pay you that huge salary. That sounds like a pretty good reason.

Hell I'm a mid-career engineer and I'd spend 40+ hours of my week moping a lake if they paid me that much.

I generally agree with what Drew is saying here, but it's important to remember it's not just the business's size. It's the mentality and values. A "lifestyle business" that isn't dedicated to growth at any cost may be less likely to leave a trail of bodies behind it, but petty mundane evil still exists in mom-and-pop shops. It's all part of the same capitalist system, from top to bottom.

It's very difficult to maintain any values when your life depends on submitting to capitalism, and I think picking on specific entities within capitalism may be a distraction. It's easier to make choices based on your values if e.g. leaving a job doesn't mean losing your healthcare during a pandemic. Only systemic change can meaningfully prevent the evils of megacorps, rather than shuffling around who is doing the harm that capitalism incentivizes.

I do think you should avoid working for evil megacorps, but perhaps it's not the best use of your time and energy to vilify people who feel that doing so is necessary. It may be better to help e.g. unionize those workforces so they can organize to e.g. hold Amazon to their climate commitments.

Some of the stuff covered by the MSM sound horrific.

I also have chinese colleagues who brought up some interesting points- namely that Uygurs and certain communities had more privileges (especially wrt one child policy exceptions) that are simply being revoked now.

A lot of the “reports” in MSM also reference Adrian Zenz [1] who these colleagues claim has an anti-China agenda.

In this age of disinformation, I just don’t know who to trust.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zenz

I have absolutely no problem simultaneously enjoying the products sold by megacorps (Apple in particular) while also believing I would likely want to curl up and die if I had to work there. I can't stand anything even remotely approaching office politics and corporate culture and have worked freelance most of my career. I most definitely want to keep it that way. =)

Disclaimer: I work at a megacorp, but as someone with 25 years in companies of a variety of sizes, I think I have some perspective.

Early in my career I worked as an IC at a non-profit, a small tech company, a startup (that went from 15 to 200 to 75), and some other medium/large tech companies. I'm currently a senior engineering director at a FAANG.

If I had a time machine and could do it all over again, I'd absolutely start by joining a FAANG. I'm actually a bit jealous when I compare the T3/T4 experience to what was available to me. They're able to learn from & work with some of the best in the industry. Their ability to advance is based largely only on themselves. Sure, I had a lot of autonomy but it's also a lot like learning the piano without a teacher. You make so many mistakes that you don't know you're making.

Likewise the tech-stack is pretty good. Not perfect (by any measure) but heads & shoulders better than what you'll find at most places.

And the variety of problems is hard to beat. Work at a company that does X, your only choice are going to be problems relating to X. Get tired of working on something at megatech? Transfer. If you're good, teams will be thrilled to have you. A lot of your knowledge will carry over, and so too, your reputation.

Now do megacorps care about you? Well, as much as any company will. To be honest, I don't think any company really will "care" about you (at least in how I care about family) and I think it's disingenuous for the author to pretend otherwise.

Both megacorps & smaller companies do care about you in a sense of wanting you to do well. But if push comes to shove, both will lay you off if financially they're forced to. I learned the hard way at the startup. Not because I was laid off, but because I had to make the list of people to layoff in my group. It really, really sucked as we felt like a family. I really admire that the CTO saw I was struggling and talked with me at length about it. I learned as a manager at any company you have to be willing to do these things for the good of everyone overall, and the best you can do is be fair about the decisions and be humane to those let go. Is that caring? My family would never do that. And if that's caring, that's exactly the same mindset I see in megacorps.

Obviously megacorps aren't perfect, but if you apply the same standard to them & whatever other option, I think they stack up pretty well.

"Blood on your hands" - oh boo-boo.

Blood washes out.

I hope FANG employees recognize themselves in this paragraph. Where you work matters.

Autonomy/impact/influence. This is maybe true, depending on things. My manager^4 knows who I am. As does my manager^5. I've interacted personally with both of them. I've openly criticized both of them. I've openly criticized other VPs. It's possible that I'm on someone's shitlist, though at this point I doubt it.

In term of impact and autonomy, I set most of my own goals at the 6 month and 1 year scope, and have influence with my leadership on defining our long term initiatives. I have the autonomy to work on a pie in the sky project that takes up 30-40% of my time that has no chance of being valuable for months, and only a potential for being useful at all. I came up with this, from the ground up, myself.

I think I've had an above average experience. But the idea that everything interesting is already taken isn't true. The idea that nepotism runs rampant also isn't particularly true. One thing I'll note about larger corps, especially G and FB, is that managers get more training on how to be managers than at most other companies, this means that they'll encourage you to set career goals, and work with you on figuring out how those can happen. This can include helping you move to other teams. Again this isn't universal, bad managers exist, but I'd hypothesize that the median manager at FAANG is less shitty than the median manager at a smaller but still billion dollar company.

The H1B abuse stuff applies, as far as I know, significantly less to FAANG than other tech companies. If you include contractors/vendors this can get murky though.

I don't disagree about HR not being particularly friendly at megacorps. But you're not going to have a particularly better experience at a smaller company. If you antagonize a smaller company, it may still end badly (and I'd argue there's a higher likelyhood something you do will get taken personally).

Arguments about gig workers and unethical behavior by the company apply as much, if not more, to smaller companies like Uber and Lyft (and Doordash and and and). And ultimately reduces to a sibling of the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" argument. We certainly shouldn't throw up our hands about such things, but if you try to self-host your server, you're still purchasing components that probably involved dangerous cobalt mining and there's a good chance that you'll be using more energy than if you ran in a datacenter in the cloud.

There are indeed many other companies. But that doesn't mean that small companies are better. Is Uber-under-Kalanick more ethical than Amazon? Is Uber-today more ethical than Google? Is Square more ethical than Microsoft? Sure, maybe, but I don't think the answer is so blatantly obvious that these conclusions can be drawn so strongly and with so little nuance.

The core argument here seems to be that since big companies are large, and they do bad things, they're somehow worse than average because they are big. I'm at least somewhat receptive to these arguments, since things like monopoly concerns come into play at some size, but trying to blame individual employees for choosing what is ultimately a much better deal for them when the problem is that the company is (maybe) too large isn't a great approach.

Heck, for a particular ethical individual, the concrete ethical impact one could have by working at a FAANG as opposed to a smaller company is probably larger, you're betting on the influence you'll have in the small company being comparatively greater than the influence the small company has compared to the big one. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not though.

And the whole time, the big companies are on average treating employees better than small ones.

You very likely won’t be happier at other tech companies, because despite promises of career growth, autonomy, greater responsibility and company mission, it will just be the same ruthless corporate shilling, just with worse hours, worse vacation, worse pay, and worthless lottery-like equity.

I urge a lot of caution. The only reason to work at a startup (all other constraints like visa issues, geolocation preferences, etc., being equal), is because you have absolute faith in the core business model.

Choosing to work at a startup because of the technologies you will supposedly use, the seniority of the role you’ll supposedly be given, the fun-seeming optics and kid-like atmosphere, lack of dress code, etc., is a massive, massive mistake - not because those preferences are wrong, but because startups absolutely don’t fulfill them. They just pay lip service to it.

For 90% of employees, the choice is purely between medium-corp and mega-corp, based on your relative appraisal of work/life balance and compensation.

It would be great if this were different and the charismatic nature of startups really did offer offsetting benefits through learning, autonomy, etc. But that is just across the board a total false promise bill of lies in startup marketing to bait & switch tech workers they otherwise can’t afford on the basis of market compensation.