Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

I routinely turn down offers from the big players because I imagine once I'm in, it's going to be like the movie Brazil.

I've worked for three large companies as a non-contractor - and I mean maybe I just didn't have the right title but I found the following (in all three):

* I was prohibited from working on broken things that I was capable of fixing but I wasn't assigned to - even if nobody else was addressing them ... Almost as if there's some internal taxonomy model which strictly defines my role as X and only X. Having things lay broken is so frustrating to me.

* Pointing out that projects are on a steady course for derailment and failure was discouraged. Recommending any fix whatsoever was completely a prohibitive.

* Questions like "what does the client want?" or "Can I ask the client a question" always came back with things like "That's not your job".

* Proposals to big payoffs for small LOEs that would substantially improve the project always got shot down. Probably because the "from" field of the email was wrong.

* Creativity, innovation, and working on big new problems was incredibly discouraged. The concept that I have more than just one ability appears either cognitively impossible or structurally incompatible.

I got a nice paycheck - the work was relatively stable and secure, and everything was running smoothly --- but I was completely wasting years of my life.

On the contrary, all the small companies I've worked for have been the exact opposite. It's not that I necessary want to do contract negotiations and SOW writeups, but it gives clarity and purpose that I was just unable to get from the larger firms.

I mean again, maybe it's because my resume doesn't say "PhD, Stanford" on it - I don't know.

Has your experience been dramatically different?

Additionally, copyright doesn't disallow you from copying a file from one device you own to another. Copyright is about the distribution of ideas between people, not about arrangements of bits.

Coming from the other side, that's frustrating to me too. I was working with a broken tool that the vendor wanted $200,000 to fix. I hacked together a shell script over the course of a few weeks that eased my pain, but required I work in a Linux virtual machine. I would have loved to port it to something that works on Windows like Python, but it was just glue over awk and sed and trim, and I have no idea how to replace those in any other language.

But you know who did have that knowledge? Our resident programmer. But every time I brought it up to the boss that he should work on it and get it running on Windows, the answer was "he has more important things to do, and if he has time to work on your side project, he needs more work to do". Literally. And in the next breath, the boss said "we need that script to follow our programming practices" aka Windows and Java. I'm not a damn programmer! But we do have one on the team!