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I don't want to work for a big company

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Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#11

Post by maxerickson »

joelrunyon wrote: post #6
tachion wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about first link from Google when asked your question? ;) http://gizmodo.com/5935016/what-is-medium

Even that link concedes - "There's really nothing new about Medium." I'm really not trying to hate on Medium - it looks really clean, but I'm just trying to figure out it's placement in the content publishing space.

I see it as just being a brand.

Some of the old magazine publishers are exploiting their brands by having stables of people throwing up whatever topical crap pops into their brain, never mind quality or accuracy, so there is clearly some market for topical writing (seems to me the tendency for articles to occasionally get huge attention drives posting lots of articles).

If Medium can build a brand around having decent recent articles, more power to them (I see svbtle as the same thing, with different ideas about curation).

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#12

Post by kozikow »

shubb wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed about large organizations is that they pay more. Pay is set in a structured way with regular pay rises, so you can just sit tight and watch it rise. Additionally, you can move around without leaving the company. Why is that important? Check the graph from the long term unemployment article[1]. Personally, I like to move every 2 years, so that's kind of important. I'm going to write about someth…

London is city of finance. There are only few good technology companies that happened there. A few years majority of good people went to investment banking and starting a company was perceived as reckless. Probably a lot of programming places was kind of outsourcing places, not creating long term product.

Would you relate your situation to the Silicon Valley, where majority of new tech companies have been created? How would you compare situation of your friends to situation of people who joined Google 15 years ago, or Facebook 8 years ago?

I would bet that in UK ratio of revenue of big companies to small companies is much higher than in Silicon Valley.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#13

Post by paganel »

shubb wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed about large organizations is that they pay more. Pay is set in a structured way with regular pay rises, so you can just sit tight and watch it rise. Additionally, you can move around without leaving the company. Why is that important? Check the graph from the long term unemployment article[1]. Personally, I like to move every 2 years, so that's kind of important. I'm going to write about someth…

> The funny thing is that those left behind don't have an opportunity to get on that gravy train now.

For what is worth, I noticed that also (not in the UK, but somewhere else in Europe). My ex-wife, a psychology major, managed to get hired into a big oil company doing procurement work (yes, they were that desperate at hiring people) around 2005-2006. Of course, in the meantime she has gathered a ton of experience and she'd have no problems whatsoever of picking another similar job at another big company.

For comparison, looking at kids aged 22 to 24 who have just graduated it seems like they're, well, fucked. Nobody will hire them in a big company for lack of work experience and they can't get any experience because nobody wants to hire them.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#14

Post by bluedino »

We're a web development company in a 'company town' where everyone seems to work for a single Fortune 50 company. You think it'd be easy to hire developers away when you offer good pay and benefits, 4.5 day work weeks, flexible hours, casual dress code, and we buy you whatever hardware you want.

We don't get a single qualified applicant. We use Ruby and Javascript, it's a ~ 25 person company so you can make a difference, you can work on iOS or Android stuff. If you only know a different programming language, we'll still hire you and let you learn if you can prove you're competent.

We're not silicon valley or a 'cool' city, but we're near a few state universities. I guess people would rather sit in a cube, in a suit, while they work on legacy internal apps in VB and .Net for a cold, dark corporation and wait 20 minutes each morning in line at the security gate just to get on the damn property.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#16

Post by bluedino »

carterschonwald wrote: post #5

The vast vast majority of interesting technical work is done in large organizations, or at least organizations that have enough people that you're not "picking your clients". Small companies that have genuinely interesting work are sadly the exception rather than the rule. Many of those small organizations support themselves with DARPA R&D contracts or the like. If you really care about interesting work and colleague…

> The vast vast majority of interesting technical work is done in large organizations

So is the vast majority of boring technical work.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#17

Post by SatvikBeri »

One of the cardinal rules of software development is to ask your market what their pain points are, but come up with the solutions on your own. That's because your users understand their problems, but they aren't aware of the different ways you can solve those problems.

For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the over-association fallacy. The over-association fallacy is when you think "I must have X, Y is one way to get X, therefore I must have Y."

This post is a classical example of the over-association fallacy. What the author really wants is the freedom to experiment, and he concludes that you can't have this in a big company.

However, there are plenty of big companies that give you that freedom, and plenty of small companies that don't. The smallest company I ever worked for had 4 people, but the CEO was an extreme micromanager who layered huge amounts of work on his employees and was terrified of innovation. In contrast, I had a huge amount of freedom to play around at a giant bank, because I automated all my work and my manager only cared about the quality of work (not how many hours I spent.) The result of this playing around helped me learn a lot and save the company millions of dollars.

So keep in mind what you really want. Don't avoid big companies, avoid places that don't let you learn anything.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#18

Post by shubb »

kozikow wrote: post #12
shubb wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed about large organizations is that they pay more. Pay is set in a structured way with regular pay rises, so you can just sit tight and watch it rise. Additionally, you can move around without leaving the company. Why is that important? Check the graph from the long term unemployment article[1]. Personally, I like to move every 2 years, so that's kind of important. I'm going to write about someth…

London is city of finance. There are only few good technology companies that happened there. A few years majority of good people went to investment banking and starting a company was perceived as reckless. Probably a lot of programming places was kind of outsourcing places, not creating long term product. Would you relate your situation to the Silicon Valley, where majority of new tech companies have been created? Ho…

You make good points, I certainly wouldn't extend this to America, or even other parts of Europe.

It is true that a lot of London money is made in finance, but we also have some giant engineering companies and subsidiaries, such as Rolls Royce, BAE. Sony, Huawei, IBM, Siemens, and others have large research presences in the suburbs, because engineers are cheaper here than in America, but we have more aggressive IP laws than China or India.

If you want a big company to get lost in as an engineer or project manager, there is no lack of them.

Working at a startup, hoping for an IPO, is a high risk high reward gamble. People choose to do it because it gives them agency over their work and futures in a way that being part of a big machine does not, but most fail, and we should be aware when we take a risk what that risk is, hence my post.

Taking advantage of London's competitive advantage in finance, a lot of financial startups have won really big, setting up major energy trading exchanges and brokerages, though you wouldn't hear of them outside the industry.

I'm more cynical about the current wave of London web startups.

Would I suggest a young Londoner goes to work at a startup? This city has a bit of an unpaid internships culture, and I fear they would get the same experience as at a larger company, for less CV impact and no money. Get into computer security at KPMG, you'll get rich.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#19

Post by blindhippo »

"But being in school is not something I truly want. I love creating, innovating, pushing myself with real-world challenges and projects, and the amount of satisfaction you get from pushing something out there is tremendous."

I've seen this type of sentiment before - it's quite common for people who don't go through school.

University level education (quality ones) give the student exactly the same feeling that the author is describing as enjoying. The only difference is that the pace of learning and achievement is far higher then it is in the real world in which you are subject to daily demands for return on investment and stability.

I've been through both University level education and real world work - I'd take University any day of the week. University provides an environment in which experimentation and play is encouraged - I have yet to find a work environment that does the same, even among small start-ups.

Re: I don't want to work for a big company

#20

Post by gav »

I'm a consultant that mainly works with big companies, the main thing big companies have in common is that they are big.

Seriously there's so much variation in how they go about things that it makes no sense to say big is bad and small is better. It all depends on the individual case. I've seen a lot of dysfunctional companies of all sizes.

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