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Working at big software companies

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67 pointsrdcastro21 comments

After working for various start-ups and freelancing most my, I took a full-time contract at Inuit (TurboTax/Quicken) about a year a go. I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the work there. The start-ups I worked at were never huge successes so getting the chance to work on a Rails app that gets hundreds of thousands of requests per minute (it's embedded in TurboTax) was something new for me and provided a different set of challenges.

I've also found that large companies (or at least Intuit) are very open to progression and innovation. When I started our team was on Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.3.5, in a physical data center, used Perforce, and a bunch of other "enteprise" software suites. Now we are cranking on latest versions of Ruby and Rails, Github, AWS, and Campfire.

It has been a much more rewarding experience than I would have thought. Oh and you have no idea how good it feels to get real, publicly traded stock :)

I absolutely agree that typically the impact you can have at a big company can be huge. But it may come with a cost - adjustment to that structure.

As I mentioned in the post, it is a great environment for many people, and I'm glad to hear about your case.

The "You're Not Working With The Owner" aspect of a big company is usually the most underrated reason why some companies succeed in hiring and retaining top performers, and some don't.

The immediate manager is a major reason, from what I've seen, for why people leave or love their jobs. The manager may not even share the same ethics that need to flow down in the company from the founders/owners, and may even work towards ensuring her/his own appraisal success. This is why maintaining the big company's culture is such a tough task, and one bad hire at a senior level can slowly destroy major chunks of it.

Spot on. And the big question is how to make the right hires to maintain the company's culture. Probably it's not so much about making the right hires, but quickly fixing the bad hires.

I worked at a corporate giant where my skip level did not know who I was for close to 8 months. He never met with any of the employees besides the leads reporting to him, his manager and his peers. I think he had to find out about me when I left, but he still didn't even bother trying to talk me out of it.

How many people were under him?

I think somewhere between 30 and 40.

This is absolutely what happens. I've been fortunate in my own management over the years but I have witnessed atrocious management "nearby" and talked to friends at other companies in similar situations. One or two quit entirely because of their direct managers. Layoffs happen, incredibly talented people are pushed out the door for some stupid reason or another, and yet the most poisonous of managers somehow keep their jobs at most companies it seems.

> Sometimes some compromises will be made in order to keep the team "stable", so the business can keep going.

The thing to remember about big companies, is that they've already figured out some formula to approximately "print money." (Not really in all cases, what I mean more seriously and generally is just they already know how to make a profit.) So not rocking the boat will be seen by many there as the rational thing to do.

You're absolutely right about that. It takes a lot of courage to do something that could affect the bottomline for the next quarter. Another thing is that, when the company's culture rewards those who don't make mistakes rather than those that are bold and try new stuff (therefore making some mistakes), then not rocking the boat is institutionalized. New things are not tried, as they are too risky, and anything old that becomes a liability must be quickly fixed or gotten rid of.

Another phenomena that exists in all companies, but that you really see in big ones, is secretiveness about how people are actually being rewarded. This has two purposes. The first is that it allows the company to reward certain employees (particularly top manager) while heading off jealousy among others. The second is that it allows them to lie to people about how well they are compensated versus others.

I wouldn't want to work for an entity that implements "decision processes", I'd much rather work for a (small) company that takes decisions. It's that simple.

Also, even though I'm already in my early 30s the word "career" scares me. I'd rather build things

Ah, but a good career can enable you to build cooler and cooler things.

I like your "I'd rather build things". I think you can also build things at big companies, but it's just different types of things and much different process. It's just that, depending on your org, you may end up building more slowly (sometimes way more slowly) or you will build something that was decided by others and that you didn't have much input on.

To be fair, some times you can build things much faster as the process for capital expenditure of sizes necessary is more straightforward. "Oh? You need to spend 20 million dollars on some hardware? Cool. Follow this accelerated RFP procedure."

I've never worked at a "big company", but I've worked at small ones, and one of those grew to be medium-sized.

One thing that I notice that's missing from the article is support.

At every small company, I was in charge of more than 1 aspect of the product, even if that wasn't my area of expertise. I've even been in charge of every aspect, as the sole employee that could handle them.

This is extremely exciting and fun, for a while. Eventually, it wears on you and you need someone else. As the company grew and we hired more and more, I eventually settled down into having 1 main thing I was responsible for, and even that could have been handled by someone else if needed. (For vacations, even.)

Because of that, I don't want to work at a small company again. Being able to go to a database-specialist and ask for help with performance was amazing. Even though I enjoyed all those hours of DB tuning and learning about it, I'd rather have been coding. (And of course, the DB guy would rather be doing DB-guy-stuff. They tried asking him to code, and that didn't go well. It wasn't what he was good at. To be fair, I was similarly inept at DB tuning at first, but when there was nobody else, you couldn't tell how bad I was. Heck, I couldn't tell, either.)

Anyhow, my point is that bigger companies have a network of employees to lean on for support, where smaller companies require more of people.

I worked at a big software company and will never go back. The aspiring to mediocrity is the order of the day. I should never have gone to a fortune 500 and I never will again. The culture is corrosive.

Interesting viewpoint, timely as I am interning at a big bank that has a tech division and trying to decide whether this is the kind of firm I want to work for.

Also, @rdcastro, you're looking for segue, not Segway.

Thanks for the correction. Text updated.

I don't know why but consulting always seems to get left out of these types of discussions. As an consultant at a company of about 200 in size I get to influence decision making and innovation within the company - while learning about the ins and outs of medium-big companies.

Wow!...perfectly described -- thats all i can say :)

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