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

Yes, it is, but only if you're a technical person, some sort of pragmatist, or have vast niche/field/focused experience and want to apply it.

In such case you'll find yourself spending most of your time fighting to not become a complete bureaucrat, and eventually using only the minority (if any) of your time doing actual work.

However there's plenty of people that's there to "strategize", to "synergize", they're on online calls all day long, it's all career path and promotions and (hopefully) golden parachutes for them, so they'll call it exactly the opposite of "dull". What you call "dull" is actually _their goal_.

On the flip side, startup environments are way less dull but way more punishing, and may not be for everyone, or may not be for every stage of life.

The problem with large companies is that by design, it is almost impossible to see a product from all stages and from beginning to end. What that means is you're working on a tiny piece, and you can't make creative decisions on how to make things work. You also don't get much real feedback on what you do from users.

Maybe it's preference, but I much prefer to work in a small company where you can actually influence decision making. I've worked at some large companies and now I am independent and I also work in a very small company with half a dozen people. I much prefer it because it feels like there is real meaning in what I am doing.

Large companies can give you some meaning too but you have to fight for it there, and work against the bureaucracy, which I hate so I left that life behind.

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 towards the "build the latest and greatest and be the best software developer ever". The people who are just average, or good enough for their job, but don't care about staying current with the bleeding edge of tech (like what's posted daily on HN) aren't here to give you a contradictory opinion.

There’s nothing dull about it! Make sure to keep detailed records of everything you and more importantly the people around you do and say. Working in a corporation is about having brag lists for yourself and nuclear information to use against those around you, especially your boss. As you get experience you realize that at any given time everyone has said or done something that could be taken out of context as evidence that that person is a risk to the organization. It’s just that usually people don’t use such information, leaving it in a benign state. That is until they do. And hopefully not against you!

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, trying to figure out how the competition could upend the entire market, you might get less defined, less bureaucratic work. I've seen both in some of the oldest and largest companies I've worked for, but even the Skunkworks stuff is really different from startup world. Many of those projects are filled with workplace politics about who's positioned to be promoted to Senior Vice President of New Technologies and AI and who's going to be shown the door for having wasted $50million on something that can never make it to market, or even more esoteric things that only make sense in the context of the giant organization. Most of those dynamics are external, pointed at investors and finding product-market fit at smaller places. There's also less of a built in scaling factor at smaller companies -- you definitely want to figure out how to scale the product, but it's less immediately critical, whereas in a giant company, if they figure out how to upend their own business, they could theoretically deploy nearly instantly.