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Related: It drives me bananas when a mega-corp makes a small R&D team and the job req says “we are a small startup in a big company.” The benefits, bureaucracy, speed of innovation, and equity all fit the usual mega corporate shoes, so it’s probably still a traditional role.

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I was in one of these. We got equity and benefits, but we were explicitly exempted from normal bureaucracy. Our exec sponsor (and nominal manager) asked that we tell him before we launched or signed a big customer, and that was about it. Otherwise, we could do whatever we wanted with basically no oversight.

I'm pretty sure we could have gotten away with spending most of our time playing video games on the company's dime, if we had wanted. We probably would have been fired once someone found out, but that's pretty universal.

It does actually work out sometimes. I had the luck to be on one such team at Microsoft in the past, and we absolutely did have the benefit of cutting through much of the usual red tape etc, while still having access to megacorp resources.

But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.

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