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After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

kencochrane.net

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Re: After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

#31

Post by dj_axl »

buff-a wrote: post #3

I think there's another issue. At a small company, everyone (usually) has a stake. Everyone wants to make the company succeed, because having the company succeed gives each individual a huge payout. Beyond a certain size, however, new individuals will not receive huge payouts if the company succeeds. The strategies by which they maximize their individual return now involve politics, power and control. Short of killin…

> No. Wont be working at a large company again.

Agreed, although in my case it's more "Will be checking reviews on Glassdoor.com before working at any company, large or small." Unfortunately the "players" have infiltrated Glassdoor as well and you have to suss out the "real" reviews from the "player" reviews.

Re: After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

#32

Post by jedberg »

buff-a wrote: post #3

I think there's another issue. At a small company, everyone (usually) has a stake. Everyone wants to make the company succeed, because having the company succeed gives each individual a huge payout. Beyond a certain size, however, new individuals will not receive huge payouts if the company succeeds. The strategies by which they maximize their individual return now involve politics, power and control. Short of killin…

> The strategies by which they maximize their individual return now involve politics, power and control.

The problem is you are working with people who want to maximize their return -- they aren't interested in the problem at hand.

When I do hiring, I'm looking for people who are interested in the problem, interesting in making the product better. As long as the money is "good enough", they don't really care about the payout.

They just want to solve hard problems.

Once you find those, you get a lot less of the politics.

Re: After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

#33

Post by scas »

dj_axl wrote: post #31
buff-a wrote: post #3

I think there's another issue. At a small company, everyone (usually) has a stake. Everyone wants to make the company succeed, because having the company succeed gives each individual a huge payout. Beyond a certain size, however, new individuals will not receive huge payouts if the company succeeds. The strategies by which they maximize their individual return now involve politics, power and control. Short of killin…

> No. Wont be working at a large company again. Agreed, although in my case it's more "Will be checking reviews on Glassdoor.com before working at any company, large or small." Unfortunately the "players" have infiltrated Glassdoor as well and you have to suss out the "real" reviews from the "player" reviews.

Glassdoor's moderation policies also filter out a lot of negative reviews, so you never really see the full picture

Re: After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

#34

Post by d4nt »

I prefer startups too, but I disagree on a couple of points:

1. There are lots of politics at small companies too. There are lots of politics in any social context. But it probably isn't institutionalised in a small company. For example, in a big company you might hear the head of one department instructing people to lie about something in order to manipulate the people in another department. In a startup that would just be one person lying to another peerson. And if you're not in the room at the time you would know it was going on.

2. It doesn't matter how great your people are, if you have more than about 8 of them you need some structure and process. Companies don't adopt structure in order to cope with dummy's, but that's a useful side effect.

3. I doubt companies take on dummies because they've exhausted the pool of quality people. The pool of quality people is much too big for one company to exhaust, and it gets replenished every year. But great people are rarely on the market. Also, people don't deliberately hire dummies, they're just willing to accept slightly less talent than they themselves have. So, the more layers you have between the founders and the latest hire, the lower the hiring quality can get.

Re: After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

#35

Post by mkramlich »

mattmanser wrote: post #5

There's no office politics in a micro company as there's no point, one person often has absolute power. And even if it's not one person, the founders will often trust each other a lot more than you. That's fine until you don't agree with one of them. 1. The case of the mysterious Piggy Bank This caused a lot of problems at a 2 founder startup I worked at where the guy looking after the books was semi-inadvertently sk…

> ... to start a new venture and took half the staff.

but left the tank

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