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The Enterprise Experience

churchofturing.github.io

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Re: The Enterprise Experience

#71

Post by claw-el »

bentinata wrote: post #40
claw-el wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets…

It won't gonna change how people (mostly management) see the name. I've seen whole empire named after Pokemon, only for another round of restructure that will change teams name to another Pokemon. While talking to friends at other empire: > I've been digging around, who are the members of Ludicolo? > Oh, we've renamed to Felbat.

“Manager, no, you don’t get it. We can’t just name it ‘Felbat’. Pikachu evolves into Raichu, not Felbat. Even then, Pikachu don’t really want to evolve”

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#72

Post by [deleted] »

beering wrote: post #29
BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

> 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 compan…

[deleted]

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#73

Post by marssaxman »

beering wrote: post #29
BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

> 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 compan…

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.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#74

Post by ericbarrett »

vineyardmike wrote: post #50
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see or an initiative have "Excellence" in its name I know it's BS

Everywhere I've worked that added "Excellence" to a name did it when they really wanted to say: "This team wasn't working hard enough before , so I told them to be better now".

Agreed, and a great example of the signal often hidden in anodyne corporate titles.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#75

Post by AdieuToLogic »

mcdrake wrote: post #63

I'm in a similar environment and found this article painfully accurate. I keep thinking my job is to solve problems and ship software...but those are clearly not the revealed preferences * of my org. The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.…

> The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way?

I have and the biggest difference is that the larger the company, the more the problem to solve is interpersonal and/or group politics and not technical issues.

Large companies typically take a Golden Handcuffs[0] approach to retain valuable employees. Usually, this makes people who have options to leave accept more organizational bovine excrement than if the financial carrot stick did not exist.

As to how to frame the "left mega-corp to effect change" argument needs to be framed... Well, that's about it. Every smaller team I have had the privilege to work with has understood why I did.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#76

Post by AdieuToLogic »

linkage wrote: post #67
mcdrake wrote: post #63

I'm in a similar environment and found this article painfully accurate. I keep thinking my job is to solve problems and ship software...but those are clearly not the revealed preferences * of my org. The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.…

It's a tale of two cities, in my experience. Much like you, I'm sick of wasting away the best years of my life doing nothing of consequence at $ENTERPRISE and I'm willing to take a 20% pay cut at this point for a chance to actually ship things at a small company. Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills y…

> Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.

Try describing where you want to be and not so much where you have been.

By that, I mean when interviewing with smaller organizations, pick out the things you have learned which would be beneficial to a much lesser funded effort. For example:

  - automated builds are repeatable
  - unit/feature/integration tests translate to lower costs
  - too many layers of management stifles progress
  -

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#78

Post by MarkSweep »

churchofturing wrote: post #41
BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post? In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger s…

Sure, "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions". But, if there was no increase in compensation, you would try to move up the corporate ladder?

I'm not trying to invalidate your post; I think your essay is great. I think it just does have enough cynicism. These $ENTERPRISE companies basically set up their employees some kinda game. There are certain rules (some written, some unwritten) for how you get a good performance review and how you get promoted. Just like there were dumb rules for you had to write code on a whiteboard to get the job despite the fact that you have never written algorithms ever, much less on a white board. So you have to balance how much you are doing something actually useful with jumping through whatever hoops that are downstream of whatever idea your VP has come up with this week. In the ideal case you move yourself to a part of the company that aligns with your values and interests so that the promotion comes easily, but sometimes it is easier to stay where you are and just grind through whatever absurdity it takes to stay employed.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#79

Post by ajxs »

Trasmatta wrote: post #27
gherkinnn wrote: post #9

I can't handle such organisations. I simply cannot. I don't care if they pay 3x, they break me within a few months.

Sometimes I consider optimizing for money, and getting a much higher paying job at $ENTERPRISE, then peacing out once I have enough saved for an extended sabbatical. But just the thought of going through the interviewing hazing ritual takes the wind out of my sails immediately. I'm currently at $MIDSIZENOLONGERSTARTUP, which incidentally has its own slew of insane and draining things that are breaking me in its own w…

> ...interviewing hazing ritual...

In my experience it's the small shops who are more likely to batter you with 12-stage interview processes, LeetCode-style tests, and creepy 'Record a video of yourself talking about why you want to work for BONTO' exercises. I've worked nearly my entire career at enterprise companies, and I can safely say they've always treated me with more respect in both the interview process and the job itself, than the smaller companies. Keep in mind, I live in Australia, and I've never worked for FAANG, which will skew my perspective.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#80

Post by Agingcoder »

BrenBarn wrote: post #32
beering wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 compan…

> 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 proje…

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’

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