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Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#71

Post by badpun »

neongreen wrote: post #68
jon-wood wrote: post #40

At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful. I managed to stick out for about a year after the startup I’d been working for was acquired by a multinational. I’d been an early engineering hire at the startup, and by that point was a technical lead for one of the teams. On being acquired I got promoted to technical lead for the newl…

What were the biggest obstacles to figuring out whether someone has opted out of marketing communications?

I worked in a large bank (top50 globally) who literally couldn't tell you how many customers they have. It was an impossible task, and when the new CEO asked, he was told exactly that.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#72

Post by alberth »

lrvick wrote: post #57

My 2c having done a bit of everything Consulting: Limitless income, low job security, high value interesting work Megacorps: High income, medium job security, meaningless work Startups: Medium income, low job security, sometimes meaningful work Open source: Low income, low job security, work that lasts forever I balance a mix of Consulting, a Startup job, and Open source these days. I tweak the dials between those to…

> Consulting: Limitless income

Not exactly.

Consulting is purely a function of your Bill Rate x Hours Worked.

And given there’s only so many hours in a day, it’s very much a Limited Income job.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#73

Post by badpun »

artyom wrote: post #27
jvm___ wrote: post #15

Do you want to produce something, or do you want a paycheque for doing work? If you're a plumber, do you want to be responsible for building a brand new skyscraper with top of the line pipes, or do you just want to show up to your dead-boring factory maintenance job, fix the things you know how to fix and go home to your wife, kids and/or hobbies - which is where you draw satisfaction from life. Hackernews is slanted…

I never bought the idea that work has to be hell to be financially viable. That's just marketing from the C-suite psychopaths. Have you seen many new skyscraper-level sites pulling all-nighters constantly? And if you saw one, do they do it with the same people that was there at 7am the day prior? There's regulations (and sometimes unions) that make those the best-paying jobs for plumbers and also making sure that the…

My understanding is that there's a ton of overtime in construction work. The projects are on a fixed schedule (a Gant chart made in MS Project), but unpredictable things happen all the time, so overtime is necessary to catch up.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#74

Post by badpun »

marssaxman wrote: post #49
sterlind wrote: post #42

No, it doesn't have to be dull. In fact, huge companies are more likely to have interesting technical problems than startups. The value of most startups is in their business plan, not their codebase. The code is just there to sketch out a rough prototype of the idea. Startups rarely have the time or money to sink on deep theoretical research. Also, few startups operate at a scale where they actually need fancy tech.…

I have worked for both of the companies you mention, hoping to get involved with the interesting technical problems they are famous for, and in each case I was disappointed. What I observed was that you cannot really get a job doing the interesting work, not directly, because a megacorp does not hire for those positions; those core jobs go to trusted veteran insiders. The organization grows from its edge, not its cen…

This makes sense. In software, there's fairly small amount of really interesting work, and an endless ocean of mundane drudgery otherwise. Giving the interesting work to your high-performing veterans as a non-monetary reward is your best bet to get good results, and to retain them.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#75

Post by asquabventured »

wcunning wrote: post #19

In many ways, it's about where you are in any company. If you're in a business critical, mature project with massive risk controls to prevent anything from going haywire, it's going to seem slow, since you'll (for instance) end up spending 5 hours running tests, formal verification and such to ensure that you're 5 line change doesn't break the system. If, on the other hand, you're in the new Skunkworks division, tryi…

Your post is excellent. Context really changes everything!

As a whole though I would say large orgs generally bring stability and stability can be boring to our brains that have evolved from thousands of years of living hand-to-mouth.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#76

Post by Nihilartikel »

alberth wrote: post #72
lrvick wrote: post #57

My 2c having done a bit of everything Consulting: Limitless income, low job security, high value interesting work Megacorps: High income, medium job security, meaningless work Startups: Medium income, low job security, sometimes meaningful work Open source: Low income, low job security, work that lasts forever I balance a mix of Consulting, a Startup job, and Open source these days. I tweak the dials between those to…

> Consulting: Limitless income Not exactly. Consulting is purely a function of your Bill Rate x Hours Worked. And given there’s only so many hours in a day, it’s very much a Limited Income job.

It's not common, but fixed/value based bids aren't impossible to pull off.

That's the one way to really decouple pay from hours.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#77

Post by galdosdi »

neongreen wrote: post #68
jon-wood wrote: post #40

At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful. I managed to stick out for about a year after the startup I’d been working for was acquired by a multinational. I’d been an early engineering hire at the startup, and by that point was a technical lead for one of the teams. On being acquired I got promoted to technical lead for the newl…

What were the biggest obstacles to figuring out whether someone has opted out of marketing communications?

Not the OP, but I recognize this kind of situation from my own frustrations at bigcorps:

There are probably

1) many legacy systems with slightly different definitions of opted out, which may be out of sync with each other, forcing the developer to figure out an algorithm for what to decide in the many edge cases, forcing the dev to gather more requirements from many different stakeholders who did not anticipate this

2) many organizatioal owners for all these involved systems and for pieces of the logic and it's consequences, all of whom have different corporate priorities and incentives and calendar schedules

The result is a trivial thing becomes a jungle of scheduled meetings to gain access to the appropriate systems and to make decisions about each edge case, and ultimately go further up the change to reconcile incompatible opinions about how edge cases should be handled

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#79

Post by artyom »

badpun wrote: post #73
artyom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never bought the idea that work has to be hell to be financially viable. That's just marketing from the C-suite psychopaths. Have you seen many new skyscraper-level sites pulling all-nighters constantly? And if you saw one, do they do it with the same people that was there at 7am the day prior? There's regulations (and sometimes unions) that make those the best-paying jobs for plumbers and also making sure that the…

My understanding is that there's a ton of overtime in construction work. The projects are on a fixed schedule (a Gant chart made in MS Project), but unpredictable things happen all the time, so overtime is necessary to catch up.

Depends on what you're referring to with overtime. If it means 24/7 rotating shifts to compensate for the unpredictable, yes, that absolutely happens. So it's not so much "overtime", is "off-hour shifts".

Again, this started as an "skyscrapers sites" analogy. If you have a guy working in such construction for 20 hours straight, you're calling for a (very possibly fatal or catastrophic) accident, and there's absolutely no insurance company that'll cover for that, among other problems you'll be calling for.

Re: Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

#80

Post by quickthrower2 »

neongreen wrote: post #68
jon-wood wrote: post #40

At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful. I managed to stick out for about a year after the startup I’d been working for was acquired by a multinational. I’d been an early engineering hire at the startup, and by that point was a technical lead for one of the teams. On being acquired I got promoted to technical lead for the newl…

What were the biggest obstacles to figuring out whether someone has opted out of marketing communications?

Probably they couldn’t discover the user info provider because the user info provider aggregator service requires an ISO timestamp representing the end of the universe.

I think that Microservices parody is frighteningly close to real life.

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