Fun read, from a Swedish background "Uncertainty is weakness" seems so very American though and the opposite of both how we operate and what TheRightWay (tm) should be. As a senior dev working as a consultant for the past 8 years coming in and questioning how things work and recognizing what's unknown or doesn't make sense on a daily/weekly basis sometimes feels like my biggest contribution to the team and usually starts many interesting and productive sessions.
The Enterprise Experience
121–130 of 158 posts
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#122I'm in a similar situation, having left a startup a year ago to work at $BIGCORP, naively thinking it would benefit my résumé. This is all painfully accurate. The other thing about working for $BIGCORP is that it molds your skills to be hyper-specific to this company. It's less about learning to use cool technology stacks, than it is about learning the internal tools, procedures, and unspoken etiquette of the company…
On the other hand, working at $BIGCORP will probably give you very good domain knowledge (as $BIGCORP's software is likely complex and actively used by many many people who signed very expensive contracts, and besides that also the knowledge on how to navigate the internal complexities of a $BIGCORP) that will be useful for work in other companies?
> that will be useful for work in other companies?
No. But all those tools and processes? Those are valuable at smaller companies -- or maybe even a SaaS when you leave.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#123I moved from startup to enterprise a couple of years ago. I never realised a job could be simultaneously so easy, while also being so frustrating.
It feels like there's very little commercial or technical juice, and very low standards. Frankly this became even more noticeable after the last wave of offshoring.
The "cloud sales" & "enterprise architecture" nexus has got a lot to answer for as well. There's an entire parallel ecosystem of people whose job is purely to sound impressive to non-technical stakeholders and then funnel money to AWS. Currently these guys are busy rebranding as "agentic systems" experts, just like they went from being OOP to microservices experts in the 2010s.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If you want to become a researcher in data science or developper evangelist for instance, you'll need a org that can sustain your work. Or if you want to be a micro service architect, you'll be booed in a 3 people shop but heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies. Same for engineering manager paths, it only makes sense if you have the headcount. > software is ba…
> heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies Unfortunately, because most of those 3000 will think about the fact their org is 3000 people. Not that the user base for the new product is 5 people using it only on the weekend.
I’ve worked in a lot of enterprises on “tiny projects” but never on something that only went to 5 users. In one role I was the sole maintainer of a “small internal tool”…that had 1,000 daily users logging 5 hours/day each.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#125Pretty accurate having worked for startups and $ENTERPRISE alike. I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind. Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.
Wait, big shift back... tell me more.. you mean to say that someone stopped suckling at the teat of big cloud ?
Gartner claims 25% of the Fortune 500 are currently working to move back to on-prem for the majority of their applications. It’s not sexy so doesn’t appear in tech news as much but it’s happening
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#126> At this point I hadn't realised that finding who is responsible for something in a large organisation is very much not straightforward.
This resonated strongly with me. Last time I worked in an Enterprise shop, I happened to inherit the approval system - every app in the entire org, whether an internal app or from a vendor, got configured into this home-grown monstrosity of an access approval system. It actually worked well despite being made of spaghetti, but one side effect of being the tech owner was that I knew exactly who was in charge of every system in the organization. At some point I realized that my success there was at least partially due to being the human who knew how to connect all the dots, because when someone needed such info, the answer for the entire org was, "Ask Dave."
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#127Very fun and interesting article. I'm currently working in enterprise for around 3 years. I sure am growing technically, but I feel like I learn more about people, communications and bureaucracy here. That comment about budget and mouse is also on track, but with financial stability that working in $ENTERPRISE brings, I can just buy the mouse myself. Maybe some empire will question me regarding the unauthorized mouse…
s/mouse/COL yearly raise
If you prefer. Millions wasted on projects going nowhere fast, it no budget for even keeping up with inflation for salaries.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#128Always 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…
> ... Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ... the list of good things at the end of the post. Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc... I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible wit…
That was an eye-opening insight into enterprise software requirements. Thank you for sharing.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#129I'm in a similar situation, having left a startup a year ago to work at $BIGCORP, naively thinking it would benefit my résumé. This is all painfully accurate. The other thing about working for $BIGCORP is that it molds your skills to be hyper-specific to this company. It's less about learning to use cool technology stacks, than it is about learning the internal tools, procedures, and unspoken etiquette of the company…
On the other hand, working at $BIGCORP will probably give you very good domain knowledge (as $BIGCORP's software is likely complex and actively used by many many people who signed very expensive contracts, and besides that also the knowledge on how to navigate the internal complexities of a $BIGCORP) that will be useful for work in other companies?
Yeah that's also true, to a degree. Clearly, there are interesting challenges that I would have never been faced with had I stayed at a startup.
But I also found that once you reach a certain level of expertise at $BIGCORP there are few opportunities to try to push the boundaries of your domain knowledge, lest you are dead-set on taking initiatives and swim against the current of a rigid organisation. That may just be specific to my job and employer though.
And while the part about navigating internal complexity is true as well, it's harder to highlight on a CV than "I have worked with technologies X, Y and Z". At best you can say "I have worked with X at a big corp, and also Y, which you probably don't know because it's an internal tool." You just have to hope that the name of your employer alone carries enough weight on its own.
Re: The Enterprise Experience
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, working at $BIGCORP will probably give you very good domain knowledge (as $BIGCORP's software is likely complex and actively used by many many people who signed very expensive contracts, and besides that also the knowledge on how to navigate the internal complexities of a $BIGCORP) that will be useful for work in other companies?
> that will be useful for work in other companies? No. But all those tools and processes? Those are valuable at smaller companies -- or maybe even a SaaS when you leave.
The tools and processes we have here, I would not wish them on any other company, especially a smaller one.