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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?

Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.

> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?

There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.

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My experience at big companies has been that you only get the opportunity to do something big if you are willing to waste years "proving yourself" on a lot of tedious bullshit first. The job you want is not the job you get to apply for, and I've never had the patience to stick it out. Smaller companies let me do meaningful work right away.

Politely, I disagree. It means you are in a context where the risk aversion is high, everyone keeps their head down.

Done right, you can be a disruptor, for what are very benign or proven changes outside of the false ecosystem you are in.

I recommend these changes are on the level of "we will allow users to configure a most used external tool on a core object, using a URI template" - the shock, awe, destruction is everyone realizing something is a web app and you could just... If you wanted... Use basic HTML to make lives better.

Your opponents are then arguing against how the web works, and you have won the framing with every employee that has ever done something basic with a browser.

You might find this level of "innovation" silly, but it's also representative of working in the last few tiers of a distribution curve - the enterprise adopters lagging behind the late adopters.

> Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.

Okay, so career development means "bigger projects"?

> There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.

Well, maybe not, but I think the post illustrates some ways big companies are worse. I'd say that, all else being equal, companies tend to get bigger by becoming more doggedly focused on money, which tends to lead to doing evil things because you no longer see refraining from doing so as important compared to making money. Also, all else equal, a company that does something bad on a small scale is likely less bad than one that does something bad on a large scale.

projects beyond a certain size in a large org imply things which are very different - people, networking, money, regulations, politics, business, security etc all things which don’t look spectacular when you have three people, but become very important and much harder with hundreds of people.

So career development really means ‘learning a completely different skillset which is not technical’

That's a good way to put it and is something I've often thought as well, although not just in the technical realm. I think of it as "doing a different job". You used to be a teacher but now you're the principal; you used to hammer in nails but now you direct the construction crew; you used to be writing software but now you manage other people who write software; etc.

Personally I'd struggle to consider that "development" for my own life, since it often amounts to no longer doing the job I like and instead watching other people do it. I can understand how adding new skills is positive, though.

This can be mitigated by learning other technical fields ( infrastructure, security, etc ) and using your technical knowledge to steer things in the right direction - but yes, you’re otherwise right and I understand your point of view.

The Freudian slip here is great.

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