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Comment by RetpolineDrama | Hacker News Reader

You brought this on yourself when you signed up to work at $bigCo.

There's a whole wonderful world of startups out there that don't work this way, and it sounds like you'd be a lot happier there.

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Maybe so, but their culture can be just as horrid.

You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind.

Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there.

Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed.

It's all the same really.

Not every startup is like that. There's plenty of 9-5 out there. Look for startups with older people who have kids..

And plenty of large companies without excessive ceremony. Black and white thinking, needless polarization ... really gets us nowhere. That was sort of my ham fisted point.

> the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises

I wish I didn't visualize this. This could be a Renaissance painting.

Feed it as a prompt to Stable Diffusion or something and its the perfect attack on corporate greed.

Smaller shops too, not just startups. I've been in places with ~300 employees that don't have all that ceremony around performance and self set goals.

And ive worked at places with fewer than 50 devs that had implemented the okr nonsense with predictable result so it’s not universal.

The truth is that unless you run the place you really have no control over some bigco management getting hired and trying to parrot all this stuff

I’ve also worked at plenty of startups that worked just like this. Once they hire an engineering VP from bigco, the infection spreads quickly.

It is always greener on the other side of the fence, but sometimes it is greener because the septic tank is leaking.

I did several tour of duty in startups. There were good, bad, and ugly, just as much as in $bigCo.

I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?

Do you have stability at $bigCo? Yes, they're less likely to close up completely. But how likely are you to get laid off?

In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.

> But how likely are you to get laid off?

Enormously less likely than you are to have a startup or SME shut down.

As recent tech layoffs showed, job security is an illusion even at big corps. I work in toxic and heavily understaffed group. And guess what, the guy who loudest complained about being understaffed was let go. Problem solved!

> But how likely are you to get laid off?

Much less likely, and guaranteed to be with some not-unsubstantial severance. Non-RIF layoffs (aka 'firing') comes with months or years of warnings.

It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs.

A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.

>It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs.

I know HN is 90% software guys but if your product is physical and you're at $bigCo this happens far less often.

More likely you get spun off as a different company.

You mean like car companies?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ford-latest-automaker-to...

Thanks for the reply!

I think I may be less exposed to the risk of losing my job to an RIF due to belonging to an especially small but necessary niche (cryptography).

That perspective is an interesting one that I’ll need to devote more thought to. It seems particularly interesting in the light that the most lucrative and numerous employment in my field (large financial institutions) tend not to provide significant raises or internal mobility. The oft-stated workaround is to leave the company for 6 months.

Have you been paying attention lately? BigCo is laying people off by the 10s of thousands.

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