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Comment by sneed_chucker | Hacker News Reader

Apply to any SWE/DevOps/SysAdmin/IT role at a Fortune 500 company that isn't a tech company.

This could be luck of the draw. I'm at a Fortune 500 company, that isn't a "tech company", and for many years it was pretty boring. However, over the last several years certain people internally have been claiming we are now and tech company and started doing things they think tech companies do. This has resulted in a lot of work and stress, that ultimately doesn't seem to get us anywhere. They keep making us rebuild the same thing over and over again on new platforms. No one actually cares what platform it's on (it's an internal tool, and our internal customers just want reliability and consistency). But each new tech leader comes in, has us re-write on their platform/stack of choice, then they turn that "success" into a new position somewhere else, so we then get a new person that tells us to do it all again. We also have layoffs or re-orgs every 3-9 months, just to keep everyone on their toes.

I assume to escape this I need to go to a smaller non-tech company, but I assume I'd be exchanging one problem for another unknown one.

Haha I interviewed at one of those. Big corp, wanted to become bigger than Google. They took out all the old boring furniture and cubicles, replaced them with beanbags and uncomfortable tables and chairs. Drab walls were replaced with colorful offices. Suits were replaced with t-shirts and sneakers. Benefits of the lowest level was set equal to the highest (this was probably what increased productivity).

I asked them if they offered a company laptop, they thought the idea was absurd. Some are still writing blogs on how Agile worked for them.

I didn't get a second interview; the first wasn't even technical. I guess I wasn't a cultural fit, compensation fit, or they didn't know what to make of my CV at the time.

Consider moving to a different internal department if you haven't; sometimes, a silo of a company gets stuck in chainsaw mode, and the best way to deal (as an IC) is to find a different silo.

Problem with big companies is that they are now constantly trying to layoff / outsource IT where-ever possible. They prefer to outsource staff to save costs and cut overhead for accounting reasons. This mean that projects can be quite aggressive and there seems to be a desire to be way more agile and aspire to have more of a startup culture. You can see this in the UK in parts of the government and NHS and also with the big utilities. This means that there can still be a bit of stress depending on the role you are in. Enterprise companies tend to retain high level architecture and governance roles but then they are so removed from what is going on they have little control of what actually gets built, which must be frustrating too!

This is a good piece of info. I work in a fortune 50 with this, but I do some modernizing for the company, to get them away from mainframe

This must be why there are so many failures in tech across so many industries.

Apply to X for a coasting job where you're sort of prepared when it's slow, but absolutely unequipped to handle situations if the pace accelerates.

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